As emerging economies rise, the global order shifts from Western dominance to a new multipolar era, challenging past imperial models while the U.S. and Europe grapple with economic and geopolitical decline.
The last truly multipolar era was framed in the 19th century. It combined capitalism as an organizing principle for the economy, industrialisation as the defining technological development, and empire as the dominant political mode, with a distinct hierarchy of center and periphery, metropole and colonies, resource providers and resource processors. Monetary arrangements were established within empires – the Sterling Zone was the leading example—and anchored between them, by and large, by the gold standard. These imperial systems clashed incessantly.
Those that fell behind industrially – the Spanish, the Ottoman, the Chinese, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian – fell prey to the British, American, Japanese, and even the French. Germany’s aspirations to a comparable position based on its industrial strength gave us two great wars and, in between, a depression that destroyed the purely capitalist economic model in favor of a hybrid or non-capitalistic industrial and governmental system: fascism, Nazism in Europe, the New Deal in the United States, and communism or state socialism in the USSR.
In the wake of the Second Great War, there emerged a bipolar world order. One part, or pole, was the Soviet sphere, which soon divided between the USSR and the People’s Republic of China, although the international reach of the PRC was never very great. The other part was dominated by the United States, in part through multilateral institutions like the IMF, World Bank, GATT, and WTO. Within this framework, the British and French empires, and the Dutch gradually and painfully dissolved, as did ultimately the last one, a relic, the Portuguese. The dollar formed the basis of a western pole of the bipolar world order under the arrangements that were initially inscribed at Bretton Woods. The bipolar world order was competitive, it was dangerous, it was nuclear-tipped, but it was relatively stable and in some important ways it was progressive.
That is, the Soviet threat, along with in Latin America the Cuban Revolution, obliged the United States to deliver important assistance to Europe, to support the recovery of Japan, and the development of Korea and of Taiwan, and to make gestures, some of them actually meaningful, toward the development of the formerly colonial world. The commitment was, however, tainted by strong elements of neo-colonial control working beneath the surface in many cases: Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Indonesia, the Congo, Central America, and many others.
A benign hegemon?
Bipolarity ended with the collapse of the USSR from 1989 through 1992. At that point, an apparently unipolar world began to emerge, along with certain enduring myths, such as the end of history. The question was, what form would this world take? Would the remaining hegemon be a benign one in the mode of the good neighbor policy of Franklin Roosevelt and the Alliance for Progress of John F. Kennedy? Would she work through and with other sovereign countries via the United Nations, established under Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman? Would she move to construct a balanced world trading and financial system as John Maynard Keynes had hoped to do in 1944?
The opportunity to move in this direction was never very great. One may possibly see a glimmer of lost possibility in the partnership and personal affinity between Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan in the late 1980s. But if such a glimmering did exist, it was lost under George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton and in the post-Soviet chaos under Boris Yeltsin. Beneath a veneer of “liberal democratic” form, and I put those words in quotation marks, and behind an internal politics of American triumphalism, the forces of financial and then military predation prevailed—a global politics of “do it our way or else,” otherwise known and today often referred to as the so-called rules-based international order.
From the beginning, it must be said, China remained aloof from the unipolar construction. I was there in the mid-1990s in the capacity of chief technical advisor to the State Planning Commission for macroeconomic reform. It was clear that the Russian catastrophe had imprinted itself on official Chinese minds. They maintained a steady course of pragmatic, gradual reforms under political control and guidance, with a large element of the emerging private sector, let’s call it entrepreneurialism, and behind a wall of capital control.
The U.S. response was a belief in those years that eventually “liberal democracy,” and again, I put those in quotation marks, and full integration into the American-led world order would prevail in China. This was a simple act of self-delusion. No one working with the Chinese government, as I was, could have believed that particular fairy tale. Unipolarity had the effect of weakening the United States.
The high dollar, the financial basis of the system, and particularly so after the onset of the global debt crisis in the early 1980s, was the basis of its financial and political hegemony and of the real wage and services, the dominant form of employment in the United States, made the United States heavily reliant on inexpensive imports and eroded to the point practically of extinction the industrial base that had been the foundation of American power in the mid-20th century. This in turn locked American military power into an increasingly vulnerable and obsolescent technological paradigm based on aircraft carriers and land bases, expensive, far-flung, and highly vulnerable in an age of missiles and drones.
The Gulf War, the early phases of the Afghanistan War, and the Iraq War all served to obscure this development and to create an enduring illusion of power that was no longer the case in the real world. Meanwhile, burned by experience, Russia reemerged as a preeminent resource, industrial, and military center of world power. This too has been met with denial, which is now being tested in Ukraine.
In consequence, the remaining central power of the unipolar hegemon is its continuing position in the financial world. This position may endure for a certain period, but it’s unlikely to endure indefinitely. It appears that we do stand on the threshold of a new era of multipolarity. The question once again arises: what kind of world will it be? The signal characteristic of the BRICS formation is its non-imperial or anti-imperial character, distinguishing it very much from the multipolar world of the 19th century.
The empires strike back
It is true that at one time or another, Brazil, Russia, India, and China – leaving South Africa as the only exception, and it’s a partial exception since South Africa was a partner in the British Empire for a period of time – these countries all have, at one time or another, characterized themselves as empires. But none of them have ever been colonial in the European sense. Although Russia is often so now described, as was the USSR in its day, by fair appraisal, it seems to me that none of these major countries can be fairly accused of seeking domination outside the sphere of their own national linguistic and cultural communities. When tempers cool over Ukraine, this will become even more clear to most people.
One may therefore hope that if the BRICS consolidate as a pole, or rather as multiple poles of a new system in a multipolar world, they will do so on a foundation radically different from that of the 19th-century imperial multipolarity, and different also from that of the 20th-century bipolarity or the late 20th, early 21st-century unipolarity. That they will draw on the ideals, if not the practice, of the early post-World War II international system, embodied by the United Nations and in the financial sphere, perhaps inspired by Keynes’ vision for a balanced world financial order along with Roosevelt’s drive toward the regulation and control of global finance.
These two things obviously have to come together. A system in which the world economy is governed essentially by financial powers and not by nation-states is one in which multipolarity will not long survive. This leaves the question: what is the position of Europe and the United States? It was not long ago that these two regions, through the North American Free Trade Association and the European Union, both representing the integration of entire continents, were models in their own right and, in many minds, the foundation of a newly emerging world order characterized by parliamentary democracy and an increasingly deregulated private economy where decisions were to be made primarily by markets or the powers that lie behind them. This model seemed to hold, for a period of time, an automatic presumption of legitimacy.
This is clearly no longer the case. Nobody believes that the North American free trading area is going to merge as a consolidated political unit, and the European Union’s status as such is increasingly fragile and perilous. Europe, which was the seat of multiple past empires, is clearly in the deepest trouble. It has limited internal resources. It has cut itself off from inexpensive energy from Russia, and it is losing industry and markets to a rising, still rising China. Moreover, the European Union is a confederate entity. It lacks common welfare institutions, yet it is bound to a very rigid common currency.
This is not a model that an emerging BRICS or other international formation would be tempted, I think, to emulate. Instead of leveling up, Europe is presently undergoing deindustrialisation and a leveling down toward the stagnant condition for the last 20-25 years of the Mediterranean countries. This is complicated by an energy policy that is unlikely to succeed in either its environmental or competitiveness goals. Europe is, in short, the present heartland of the neoliberal ideology and in its green incarnation, and the prospects for success are not very good.
The troubles of the United States are serious, but they’re not so serious as that, thanks to relatively low energy costs for now. We will see how long they last, along with an extremely expansionary budget policy combined with the continued hegemony of the dollar. But trouble is very much on the horizon.
Physical decay is apparent. Deindustrialisation, as I mentioned before, has weakened the technical competencies of the American workforce, which is now largely accustomed to service employment, with a large professional class and relatively small elites in technology and finance. The American drama is that the elites remain ensconced in their vision of world control, which is justified in their minds by the financial position—the enduring financial position of the dollar and of the American United States Treasury bond, the American financial institutions in the world system. And so they remain committed to a vision of global dominance that no longer corresponds to the underlying realities and will probably disappoint them in due course.
A new generation to come
The challenge for Americans, those of us in North America and the United States, is therefore, first, to replace this obsolete ideological paradigm and to displace, frankly, the obtuse elites in finance, technology, military, industrial complex, and their political emissaries with a new and more realistic generation. That generation has yet to emerge, but when it does, the task will then be to work toward a reconstruction of our country’s physical and human material and to achieve this without tearing the country or its social fabric apart.
Can it be done? I will not predict that it can. It would take time and trauma. But the first step is to recognize what a multipolar world order means and what it requires. As a scholar and commentator rooted in the United States, I conceive my role as being mainly to try to understand that emergent world and try to convey the understanding to my students, colleagues, and compatriots. As a citizen also of the emerging post-imperial and post-colonial world, I consider it my duty to leave the responsibility for building that world, and particularly the financial institutions that will ultimately serve as the anchor for it, in your hands.
So, in that spirit, I will close by invoking the words of an American poet, Walt Whitman, which I first heard quite a long time ago now in the speeches of Senator Eugene McCarthy, who rose to challenge the Vietnam War in the epic campaign year of 1968. This is how he liked to close his speeches with the words, as I say, of Walt:
Poets to come! Orators, singers, musicians to come!
Not to-day is to justify me and answer what I am for, but you, a new brood, native, athletic, continental, greater than before known.
Arouse! for you must justify me.I myself but write one or two indicative words for the future, I but advance a moment only to wheel and hurry back in the darkness.
I am a man who, sauntering along without fully stopping, turns a casual look upon you and then averts his face, leaving it to you to prove and define it, expecting the main things from you.
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