Technocratic Sovereignty 2.0 Architecture, Crisis, and the Transformation of Modern State Power

Abstract Technocratic Sovereignty 2.0 (TS 2.0) offers a new theory of modern state power grounded in the infrastructures that organize contemporary political economy. It argues that sovereignty is no longer exercised primarily through leaders or formal institutions but emerges from financial, legal, digital, and production architectures. These architectures govern in “normal time,” disciplining political agency and generating path-dependent constraints, while crises temporarily weaken these structures and allow exceptional interventions. TS 2.0 integrates insights from macro-finance, international political economy, administrative law, and digital governance to build a dual-mode model of sovereignty: architecture-dominant normal time and agency-enhanced crisis time. Historically, TS 2.0 shows how crises since 1971—Bretton Woods collapse, Volcker shock, post-1997 currency crises, 2008 financial crisis, and the 2020 pandemic—created successive layers of infrastructural power that shape state action today. The paper analyzes the divergence between U.S. liquidity sovereignty, China’s production-platform sovereignty, and the EU’s regulatory-administrative model. It incorporates the post-2008 interregnum, in which China’s credit expansion reshaped global power, and the populist backlash triggered by technocratic stabilization in Western economies. Empirically, the early trajectory of the second Trump administration serves as a real-time stress test. Tariff shocks, attempts to politicize the Federal Reserve, volatility in the Treasury General Account, and pending Supreme Court rulings demonstrate how architecture constrains executive action even under aggressive political pressure. The case confirms TS 2.0’s core prediction: architecture governs in normal time; crisis enables bounded agency. The paper concludes that sovereignty in the twenty-first century is technocratic in structure, architectural in form, and reconstructed through crises.