A “world order” is a framework of power, ideas and interactions that its makers believe is beneficial for the wellbeing and stability of their societies and others beyond them. This is the definition offered by the Indian international relations scholar Amitav Acharya in his latest book, The Once and Future World Order. Acharya puts civilisations at the centre of his historical survey of selected previous orders over the last 5,000 years, concentrating on five of them before “the rise of the West”, with its early capitalist colonialism from the 16th century.
Near Eastern, Indian, Chinese, Islamic and Indian Oceanic civilisational world orders contributed their power, ideas and interactions to others. They include non-western civilisations like Egypt, India, China, Persia and the Islamic World, and western civilisations such as the Roman Empire, Byzantine Empire and ancient Greece.
They were subjected to the relentless conquests, settler colonialisms and exploitations of European, British and later US imperial powers. But they also borrowed heavily from those predecessors, both in their concepts of world order and civilised interaction – and in their ruthless use of military force.
Such a deep and broad historical perspective is needed to temper the alarmist talk of western decline and presumed worldwide instability or chaos. Much of this has flowed recently from the dramatic displays of power between Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Narendra Modi at the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Tianjin, followed by the display of Chinese military might in Beijing.
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Xi’s announcement of an SCO bank (the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation promotes economic co-operation between its member states) and big aid plans, alongside his proposed international governance initiative, reveal a confident assertion of Chinese power and ideas to counter US and western hegemonism, as he puts it. Interestingly, the governance initiative echoes the multilateralism now eschewed by his principal antagonist, the US’s Donald Trump – who is himself taking an authoritarian turn.
Such ironies are lost in much of the attendant panic about a changing world order.
Acharya subtitles his book “Why global civilisation will survive the decline of the West”. He is confident that a shift from Eurocentrism and western narratives of world order can be succeeded by a global mix of civilisational influences. This shift is a necessary corrective and heralds a potentially more genuine global humanism in the longer term.
In the shorter term, we can understand why the challenges described by EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen this week as “battle lines for a new world order based on power are being drawn right now”. She said: “Europe must fight for its place in a world in which many big powers are either ambivalent or openly hostile to Europe.” Those powers include the US, but what of China?
As Denis Staunton wrote in these pages: “The defiance towards the West on display in Tianjin and Beijing is not a sign of the emergence of a new bloc to counter the US and its allies. It is evidence that much of the world outside the US and Europe recognises a new, multipolar reality and wants to adapt the international system into one that can accommodate it.”
Yes, these are authoritarian powers, but they are not displaying the “axis of upheaval” portrayed in right-wing commentary here. Their explicit support for multipolarity is couched in the language of a fairer distribution of institutional power to match the geographical, economic and strategic shifts already under way.
Xi Jinping talks of win-win outcomes against the US zero-sum logic. His confidence arises from its evident appeal to state elites in regional and world settings impatient with US and other western sanctions outside the UN system – not least in India, Brazil and Indonesia.
A “multipolar” world order does not imply that it is more democratic or about greater freedom for citizens. It is a top-down concept, drawn from the limited historical canon of late 19th and early 20th century European imperial experience. Acharya suggests “multiplex” is a better term to describe the deep interpenetration of private and public capital, institutions and ideas that characterise contemporary globalisations., These too are being reconfigured in sovereign and regional terms.
Left-wing analysts like Vijay Prashad of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research welcome the shift seen in Beijing, but prefer to call it multilateral than multipolar. Patrick Bond, the South African political economist, insists the emerging SCO and Brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) regimes are sub-imperial, in the sense that they accept a continuing role within what remains a western-dominated world as seen from the Global South.
This emerging Asian-centred world would be more open to beneficial interaction with the EU, if it could see evidence of a desire for mutual learning from European leaders.
