The decline of the collective West is a theme that has animated historians for the past century. The devastating implosion of old Europe in the first half of the 20th century did indeed bury the formidable European empires. At the same time, it also spiralled the US to dizzying heights after 1945, which then lifted the West along with it to wage a relentless Cold War. Then, just when the rest of the world was catching up in the 1980s, the Soviet Union disappeared from the scene, providing another dramatic extension to US power. These two tectonic geopolitical shocks paved the way for the US, and thus Western primacy, on a global scale never achieved previously.
In the past two decades, another window of catching up has opened. This time around, the power shifts are real and spread across all domains of power. While the distribution of output and wealth might be uneven within each rising power, the national foundations of the economic and industrial apparatus are robust and yielding growth across a wide swathe of sectors. This also means the political economies are self-sustaining or acquiring that feature, that is, these states have domestic growth drivers and reliable access to strategic commodities that can cushion shocks from elsewhere.
The present pictures of the eight leading economies—GDP, Purchasing Power Parity—would have been unimaginable a generation ago: it includes China, India, Russia, Brazil and Indonesia. Only the US, Germany and Japan represent the ‘West’. The changing structure of global industrial capabilities is equally stark: in 2000, the West accounted for over 70 per cent; by 2030, it is the non-West that is projected to account for nearly 70 per cent of global production.
Crucial too are the military-industrial complexes in the non-West. These are also at near parity of the collective West in many areas, certainly for Russia and China, which, in some instances, have also surpassed the West in technological sophistication and scale in both conventional arsenals and nuclear-missile systems. The notion of truly independent great powers that are not held hostage by Western ideas, technology or military coercion is a reality.
The more profound change is not that power shifts are occurring—for the rise and fall of empires and nations is integral to the cycles of world history—but that it is now happening outside the exclusive confines of the Western community of nations. For the past half millennia, the rise and fall of powers was exclusively a Western affair, with each power being displaced by an even larger and more capable one from within a common geopolitical and geo-civilisational space. From the Italian city states, Dutch, Portuguese and Spaniards, France and later England, and then Germany, and finally the US behemoth, each of these players assumed the mantle of leadership over the international order.
The cycle of the baton being passed from one Western power to another has been broken. This is the big change in world history. The non-Western powers do not derive their identities, cultures, worldviews and ideals from a set of common historical experiences that defined the West. This means today’s rising powers will supply new ideas and ways of managing regional and world order. Of course, the rising powers from Russia to China, India, Iran to several sub-regional states all embody distinct societies, political systems and unique historical experiences. That diversity cannot be brushed aside and is indeed the main feature of the present age.
Yet, what makes these states enduring pillars of the emerging world order is their civilisational depth: they do not need any validation of their national identities and cultures from others. They also have the geographic size to develop domestic economic systems that can provide the basic foundations of security, development and technological modernisation, unlike the smaller European great powers of previous eras that could not compete without ceding or pooling their sovereignty into larger collectives like the European Union (EU), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) or the US-led bloc.
The other feature that makes these non-Western powers suitable stakeholders is, unlike the West, they do not possess the messianic zeal and cultures of aggressively promoting their domestic ideologies. As William Dalrymple’s book The Golden Road reminds us, ancient and medieval India’s influence from the northern shores of the Mediterranean to the Sea of Japan in the Pacific was not based on gunships and missionaries, but the astounding power of ideas in terms of cultural, intellectual knowledge and commercial creativity. Chinese influence too, albeit in a smaller geographic realm of East Asia, was built more on the attractiveness of its culture and tremendous material achievements rather than military supremacy or coercion. If anything, these non-Western powers were more inward-oriented and to a large extent remain so despite their socialisation and enthusiastic participation in a highly interconnected world system of commercial and social exchange.
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The dominant Western narrative promotes a ‘US versus China’ struggle for world leadership as the central theme of the emerging era. The problem with this prophecy is two-fold: it completely trivialises other key non-Western powers. It also slots China in the role of a typical Western challenger like a Germany or Japan from yesteryear, seeking to violently displace the dominant power and then lead the world order.
Russia, India, Iran and large swaths of the Global South are not insignificant players or simply bit balancers on a chessboard, but key regional actors with influence far beyond their peripheries. As we can see from the crises in Europe and the Middle East, these states will not sit aside and let the West dictate the narrative of a changing world order.
China, for its part, has certainly acquired formidable economic strength along with a growing regional military prowess. But its impressive material power has not led it to articulate any sophisticated vision for world leadership or promote ideas and norms that others can embrace easily. Regardless of its ability to lead the world or even Asia, which itself should be the subject of a more sophisticated debate, the normative capabilities of China to supply the ideological apparatus to lead is not apparent at all. China has plenty to offer in a material sense, but in the realm of world order ideas, its power is being felt more through multilateral institutions and networks like the BRICS where major non-Western powers are also at the helm.
The struggle for world mastery is itself an image created by the West. Centuries of geopolitical tumult with several devastating quests for hegemony and control—the most notable being Napoleonic France, Nazi Germany and the US in the post-Cold War era—have provided Western thinkers with a sole template for world order: it’s either hegemony or chaos. This false binary, ironically accepted even in parts of the non-West, including by many Indians, has led to incessant conflicts and endless wars. It has also lulled non-Western powers into condoning the status quo because the alternatives were painted as illegitimate, uncivilised and dangerous.
The rising powers appear to have finally rejected this cunning playbook and are proactively building a multipolar world, metaphorically brick by brick. This is a turning point in world politics. Diverse major powers with their indigenous civilisational identities are finally rejecting the Cold War system of ideas—which suppresses everything in its path for one grand purpose, which is the power and authority of the leader of the bloc. No rising power is prepared to play such a degrading role in a contest for world supremacy that sees their own cultures destroyed and material systems made subservient to an artificial existential contest.
That Indian foreign policy tradition has revived in all but name in recent years along with a political rejection of a Cold War system of international relations attests to this new phase.
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In 1910, leading monarchs gathered in London for the funeral of Edward the VII, in what American historian Barbara W. Tuchman vividly described as “the greatest assemblage of royalty and rank ever gathered in one place and of its kind the last… on history’s clock it was sunset, and the sun of the old world was setting in a dying blaze of splendour never to be seen again”. That moment epitomised the climax of old European hegemony and power before it rapidly crumbled in a generation of bloodletting.
The interregnum of a bipolar world was, in retrospect, an aberration in world history because of the immense destruction of the World Wars and post-colonial weakness in the rest of the world. Then the turn of the 20th century witnessed the high noon of US supremacy. Mesmerised by the unipolar moment in 2002, historian Paul Kennedy quipped that “the eagle has landed” and “in military terms there is only one player on the field that counts… Nothing has ever existed like this disparity of power; nothing”. Nearly every influential voice promised a century of unrivalled American primacy. It lasted barely a few years before the whole thing began to unravel. The question today is not whether a multipolar world is coming alive, but rather what form it will take, that is, what will be the normative texture of the new order? This is a battle of ideas.
The question today is not whether a multipolar world is coming alive, but rather what form it will take, that is, what will be the normative texture of the new order?
The declining West has no inclusive vision that can accommodate the most powerful non-Western civilisational states of our time. As American historian Eric McKitrick put it in the 1950s, “With nothing to push against it, [liberalism] thinks in absolutes; the occasional shadows which cross its path quickly lengthen into monsters; every enemy is painted in satanic terms, and it has no idea how it would behave if the enemy were either bigger or different.” In recent decades, this innate Western illiberalism has been further unleashed by the globalists at home and abroad with one aim in mind: the homogenisation of political communities. The non-West’s hybrid civilisational-national identities and cultures are seen as anachronisms and obstacles to be transformed or simply eviscerated for the globalist neoliberal vision of world order to truly flourish.
This has been the common threat to Eurasian powers and provides the deeper impetus to promote a multipolar order, which by its essence is plural and cannot have a universal ideology as its normative edifice. The ideological hubris and ambition to change different belief systems that exist in the Western mind are not part of the psyche and worldviews of Eurasian powers like Russia, India and China.
So the paeans or nostalgia from the non-West, particularly in India, for the so-called ‘rules-based’ neoliberal order are baffling because it is at odds with every philosophical tenet held by Indians, regardless of their domestic ideological disagreements.
At best, the US will adapt to a balance of power strategy whose main purpose would be to preserve American control over its traditional alliances and find a competitive bargain with new challengers in Eurasia. The civil war inside the US establishment suggests it will also have its hands full at home for the next decade, battling over the future and stability of the American republic.
If co-creating a new world order is anathema to the Western DNA that has no historical experience of such collaboration, then the responsibility of shaping a multipolar, multi-civilisational and interdependent world rests on the rising Eurasian powers. This is not a utopian choice because the material resurgence and civilisational renewal of these major non-Western powers is only assured in an inclusive multipolar world.
Western strategists and intellectuals have been betting on geopolitical discord, competitive nationalism and fratricidal conflicts within the non-West to disrupt the emergence of genuine multipolarity and stymie it in a narrow direction where an over-securitised balance of power framework remains the core bedrock to international relations. But the civilisational states have not yet succumbed to such an insular vision, and despite some longstanding geopolitical differences, are embracing their new roles as system stabilisers.
Multipolarity is now irreversible. The normative pillars of this new order will be shaped by the ingenuity and purpose displayed by the Eurasian powers in the coming decades. Unlike the US, they cannot afford to retreat or abdicate.
(Views expressed are personal)
Zorawar Daulet Singh is an award-winning author and strategic affairs expert based in New Delhi
(This appeared in the print as shaping the emerging world)
