Living Multipolarity
We don’t have to imagine anymore what a multipolar world might be like. We’re living in it. It’s unruly and prone to surprises. One of its striking features is a forceful demand by the Global South to be heard, after being relegated to the periphery of the global order since the European colonial era. They want “sustainable development,” and they want it now.
Other notable features are less US clout and a small gain in power by a China that is increasingly dismissive of US monetary sanctions.
What makes this moment potentially revolutionary is indicated in its name: This is multipolarity — not a bipolar choice between Washington and Beijing — and it’s driven in significant part by the gathering climate catastrophe.
Whether it will result in a more equitable distribution of geopolitical power and wealth remains to be seen, but at least a door is opening to a passage that leads in that direction.
Already over the last month, multilateralism has been on display at the G20 in New Delhi; the BRICS gathering in South Africa; a G77 (and China) gathering in Havana; an African Climate Summit in Nairobi; a lower-key Asean summit in Indonesia; the “slew of leaders from developing countries” — quoting China’s Global Times — visiting China, including several shunned and sanctioned by the US; and North Korea’s more broadly shunned leader Kim Jong Un’s meeting in Vladivostok in the Russian Far East with Western-shunned President Vladimir Putin.
The UN General Assembly meeting this week is struggling to get equal treatment, much less its normal top billing, as leaders of Security Council member states other than US President Joe Biden find better things to do. The US seems intent on turning the UN session into a debate on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and a lobbying opportunity for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Since a US-Russian standoff is what threatens to hamstring the UN today, as thoroughly as it did in the Soviet era, the main effect of this tactic is likely to be to further weaken this cornerstone of the traditional post-war global order.
BRICS and G20
The highest profile of the various events of the last month were the late-August meeting of the BRICS grouping of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa in Johannesburg, and the G20 gathering in New Delhi of the world’s 19 most powerful nations plus the European Union and — for the first time, with equal billing — the African Union. The two events were treated very differently in much of the Western press.
The BRICS summit was generally portrayed as a success for China in getting agreement to enlarge the group, when many thought that would be blocked by India, given the dominant role Western commentators see China exercising in BRICS. The G20 was widely portrayed as a success for India in getting unanimous agreement to a declaration that virtually ignores Western (G7) concerns about Russia in Ukraine and focuses instead on calls to reform international institutions, including the UN Security Council and the World Bank, to make them more responsive to “their entire membership.”
In fact, despite some important differences, the two gatherings were reinforcing in important ways that undermine US leadership and bolster multipolarity.
The BRICS decision to grant membership to Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Argentina, Egypt, and Ethiopia sets the organization up as an even stronger developing world counterweight to the G7 grouping of Western countries plus Japan. And while BRICS did not take the solid steps towards creating an alternative trading currency to the dollar that some predicted, it did in its joint closing declaration “stress the importance of encouraging the use of local currencies in international trade and financial transactions between BRICS as well as their trading partners.”
The fact that the new members include three major oil exporters, raising its share of global oil production above 40%, suggests that total reliance on the dollar for oil payments under the petrodollar system may come under intensified attack. US sanctions have already led Russia and Iran to settle oil trades in non-dollar currencies, and China is pushing Saudi Arabia and the UAE in that direction, as well.
The rising crude oil price engineered with Saudi and Russian production cuts is another sign of disregard for, if not outright hostility to, the Biden administration on the part of new and old BRICS members, as it threatens to reignite US inflation.
The BRICS declaration also tips its hat to the G20, reaffirming how important it is that the G20 continues “playing the role of the premier multilateral forum in the field of international economic and financial cooperation…” When that was written, while planning for the G20 in New Delhi was in its final stages, there was talk that a bust-up between the West and China-plus-Russia could lead to disintegration of the organization. The strong support from BRICS may well have helped India persuade the West to help hold the G20 together.
Hold it together India did — in a way that casts further doubt on Washington’s ability to easily push through the international outcomes it likes. The declaration New Delhi crafted only once mentions the “war in Ukraine,” and never mentions Russia’s war “on Ukraine” or some similarly judgmental characterization. The rest of the document is choc-a-bloc with statements about the need to change the rules of the rules-based international order that Washington essentially created and has overseen largely to suit itself at least since the fall of the Soviet Union.
On the World Trade Organization (WTO), for example, the declaration says: “We reiterate the need to pursue WTO reform to improve all its functions through an inclusive member-driven process and remain committed to conducting discussions with a view to having a fully and well functioning dispute settlement system accessible to all members by 2024.” The US on its own — nothing inclusive about it — has since the Obama administration blocked all nominations to the appeals body that is vital to settling WTO disputes, to the point that the WTO can barely function.
It seems the US is now calling on itself to stop blocking appointments, although there’s no reason to suppose Washington will actually do so as long as it thinks it might as a result lose WTO challenges to such policies as its blockage of the sale of advanced microchips to China, or subsidies limited exclusively to US-manufactured clean energy equipment.
At a broader level, the G20 declaration states: “The 21st century also requires an international development finance system that is fit for purpose, including for the scale of need and depth of the shocks facing developing countries, in particular the poorest and most vulnerable.” It adds, “We underscore the need for enhancing representation and voice of developing countries in decision-making in global international economic and financial institutions.”
The explanation generally given in the US press for Washington’s willingness to sign off on all these statements implying diminution of its over-weighting in international financial institutions such as the IMF and World Bank is that it wanted to bolster India as a counterweight to China — at a meeting which Xi Jinping chose not to attend for whatever unexplained reason.
India to some degree may, indeed, act as a counterweight to China in the G20 and elsewhere. But the G20 declaration, and India’s role in BRICS actions, make it crystal clear that for New Delhi, it’s not a matter of siding with the West against China and Russia. It’s a matter of promoting its own national position and angling for some degree of leadership in the Global South.
What is China up to in all this? Xi was an active presence at the BRICS gathering in Johannesburg but did not show up in New Delhi for the G20 nor to the UN General Assembly. Instead, China appears to be on a mission to host the leaders of nations sanctioned by the US, including Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and, more significantly, Putin. Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi visited Beijing back in February.
Quite what all this means is unclear, particularly in the context of evident economic strains in China and the apparent dismissal in the last few weeks of its foreign minister, defense minister, and two senior military planning officials.
What Next?
What is clear is that the rest of the Global South is not ready to simply substitute Chinese for US leadership. They share interests with China in many areas, notably including creating potential workarounds for countries under financial sanctions attack by the US, but they have their own agendas. This goes for the likes of Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and others as much as for India’s Narendra Modi.
Countries that emerged heavily scathed from the colonial era and have never fully recovered are using the US-China clash — with Europe and Russia in supporting roles — to split off into multiple middle paths. They don’t want to be aligned with either. However, today’s push is different from that of the Non-Aligned Movement in Soviet times, in that the Global South countries aren’t trying to stay outside the feud in the mainstream, they’re aiming to occupy the mainstream. They’re aiming for true multilateralism, not the lip-service variety.
It’s evident that the old ways — both US-led unilateralism and a potential restaging of bilateralism along Soviet-era lines — have hit a wall. Their legacy is climate collapse, degraded and possibly dying oceans, species extinction, and untenable economic and social inequities. The roots of these multiple crises extend back into the European colonial era — an era that looks to be finally, belatedly ending after a long US-led neocolonial interregnum.
There is no consensus, no clear vision at all of what comes next. For now, the talk is mainly of reforming the old order, but if that doesn’t work soon, replacement of the old institutions with new ones is evidently being discussed.
Hopefully African and other least developed nations will find their own nature-friendlier development models and avoid the environmentally devastating Chinese and Asian Tiger model of dependence on export-led heavy manufacturing.
Hopefully Americans will learn to live gracefully with a diminished role on the international stage.
Hopefully China means what it says about wanting to work with other nations, not boss them around.
Hopefully we won’t have a “Great Power” war, or a Great Power anything.
Hopefully we will see a multipolar, Earth-friendlier world emerge.
It’s a lot to hope for, but the alternatives are much, much worse. So let’s hope.
