Three events stand out in the questioning of the world order: the global covid pandemic since 2019, the growing rivalry between the US and China, and the war between Russia and Ukraine since February 2022.
Such challenges (especially war) have created new pressures on the global south. Some analysts suggest a return to the bipolarity of the Cold War, with a US-led West on one side and a Russia-China bloc on the other. In such a situation, countries in the global south face conflicting demands from Western countries, and to some extent also from China and Russia, to align with their economic and strategic goals. And, at the same time, they do not stop seeking greater autonomy and status in the international system.
All this has created the possibility that the countries of the global south can revitalize or reactivate the Non-Aligned Movement (developed in the 1950s and 1960s to stay out of the competition between the US and the USSR) with the in order to find a common voice and offer a third collective way in the construction of the world order. At first glance, there seem to be good reasons for such an approach given the impact of the pandemic on US-China relations and the subsequent confrontation between Russia and Ukraine.
The covid showed that the global south does not love either of the two great powers. Both responded to the pandemic in very different ways internationally. Trump not only remained isolationist, but stepped on the “America First” accelerator. China, by contrast, pursued an activist foreign policy. While Trump denounced globalization and supply chains, Xi defended globalization and doubled down on Chinese support and leadership claims to global governance. While the US was buying up masks and ventilators around the world, China launched an ambitious global diplomacy of masks and, later, of vaccines (this long before the US).
In the end, neither power succeeded in projecting a positive image of responsible global leadership. As for the US, it wasn't just that it "decided not to lead during a global crisis," as Tom Wright put it.(1) Actually, it was the internal failures of the US government that mattered most. Trump. The absurdity of his faithful rejecting the obligation to mask and social distance in the name of freedom was a caricature of American values in the eyes of the entire planet.
However, the pandemic response did not do China's image and influence any favors either, especially in Asia. This region is fundamental, since it is not only the part of the world that is growing the most economically, but also the main arch of the geopolitics of the great powers capable of reinforcing or containing the rise of China to the category of great world power. But as recent opinion polls indicate, Beijing's “trust deficit” in Southeast Asia has stubbornly persisted. In the percentage of those who express "little confidence" or "no confidence" that China "will do the right thing in the interest of the world community", the country has systematically garnered the mistrust of more than 60% of those surveyed,(2) a situation that is not helped by his insistence on a zero covid policy at a time when much of the world has adapted to the pandemic as a matter of course.
In short, covid makes neither the US nor China very attractive to the rest of the world. This leads to the possibility that a considerable number of countries in the global south will adopt the Shakespearean attitude of “a bad plague reaches both of your bloodlines” exclaimed by a character from Romeo and Juliet (an apt, if cruel, metaphor for our times), as happened during the cold war, when a large number of countries rejected the two blocs of superpowers.
On the war, the attitude of the global south has been somewhat ambivalent, but it is certainly not on the side of the West against Russia. In that sense, early hopes that sweeping Western sanctions against Russia would revive Western unity and US leadership in world affairs may be overly optimistic. Shortly after Putin's attack on Ukraine, Stewart Patrick of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) wrote: "In a catastrophic step, the Russian president has succeeded in revitalizing Western solidarity, reinvigorating US global leadership, catalyzing European integration, exposing Russia's weaknesses, undermining Moscow's alliance with Beijing, and ridiculing its authoritarian imitators.”(3) From this point of view, Putin has given new vigor to the idea of the West. As a columnist for Slate magazine wrote, “Pro-Ukrainian sentiments in search of an organizing principle are coalescing around an identifying category that has not enjoyed real, popular international relevance for a long time: the West, a category against which Vladimir Putin has been lashing out for a long time, but that Westerners themselves have not claimed, at least in recent years, with too much personal attachment or ideological loyalty.”(4)
As far as the global south is concerned, however, a plausible and entirely different outcome could be that instead of reinvigorating the dominance of the West in the world order, it accelerates its demise or creates a more level playing field between the West. and the rest of the world.
Putin's coup in February 2022 now looks like a dangerous miscalculation. It has darkened not only the future of Ukraine and Russia, but also that of Europe in general. Instead of making it safer, NATO expansion has made Europe the “most dangerous place on earth.”(5) A major war has returned to the heart of Europe. The war has cost the West, and Europe in particular, much of its appeal as a model of peace and prosperity. It should not be forgotten that, after the end of the cold war, Europe was presented as a general model for the construction of world order. European concepts such as "common security", pan-European identity or "common European home", as articulated by the Palme Commission in 1982 and promoted by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), aroused attention, including attraction, from all over the world. However, those ideals have fallen by the wayside.
Commenting on the implications of the Russia-Ukraine war for the world order, Fareed Zakaria observed: “One of the defining features of the new age is that it is post-American. By this I mean that the pax americana of the last three decades has concluded.”(6) Zakaria first proposed the idea of the “post-American world” in 2008. However, then he was referring, more than to the order constructed by the US .UU., to the relative decline of US power resulting from the "rise of the rest." Until now he had not accepted the end of the liberal order, long after other analysts have done so.
Although the global south is not a singular category, most countries (including most Asian countries) do not see Russia as a threat and are not really interested in taking sides in an ideological competition and military rivalry between NATO and Russia nor between the West, on the one hand, and Russia and China, on the other. They view the Russia-Ukraine war as a European and transatlantic mess, but feel highly victimized by it, bearing a disproportionate share of the cost of rising energy and food prices and disrupting supply chains. supply. Furthermore, while they condemn Putin's aggression, they do not necessarily support the revitalization of the US-led liberal international order, aside from the fact that China, India and South Africa abstained on March 2, 2022 in the Assembly vote. General of the UN in which Russia was condemned, among the African countries the vote for that resolution was 28 in favor and 17 abstentions. Brazil and Mexico voted in favor of the resolution, but refused to join the sanctions on Russia. In other words, as far as the global south is concerned, condemning the Russian invasion as a matter of principle, respecting sanctions out of fear (of US retaliation), and rejecting internationalism and Western double standards are not mutually exclusive. exclusive.
Such ambivalence is not surprising. Western sanctions remind countries of the global south of the coercive economic power of the West, which can be used against them if Western interests and expectations are challenged. The pressure exerted on them by Western policymakers to take sides and join sanctions against Russia, backed by the threat of secondary sanctions, reminds them of the pressures they received in the cold war. In addition, the opinion of Africans and the Middle East also points to the harsh treatment of refugees from those regions in Eastern Europe, including by Ukraine. The memory of the long history of interested military interventions carried out by the West also persists. This shows that attempts by Western politicians and analysts to reject any moral equivalence between Russian interventions and those of the US and NATO are not convincing in the non-Western world.
With its expanding membership and increasing interventions in conflicts inside and outside Europe, NATO is no longer seen in the global south as a “defensive military alliance”, as Western policymakers and media outlets often try to project. communication such as the BBC.(7) NATO seems to be, rather, the last bastion of a receding Western hegemony. The harebrained idea of a global NATO, championed by influential US and UK think tanks, would widen the perimeters of global disorder by drawing more and more European countries (who do not see China as an existential threat) into competition between US and China in Asia, and Asians (who do not see Russia as a threat) to the Russia-NATO conflict in Europe. It should be remembered that many post-colonial countries viewed Western multilateral alliances, such as NATO, the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) and the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), as a “compact return to colonial rule,” as noted by political scientist Rupert Emerson in his 1962 book, From Empire to Nation. These sentiments led Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Indian Prime Minister, and Sukarno, the founding President of Indonesia, to denounce SEATO, especially at the Asia-Africa Conference held in Bandung in 1955. It was that conference that really laid the foundations for the Movement of Non-Aligned Countries.
Now, will the pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine war trigger a similar response from countries in the global south? In my opinion, a full-scale resurrection of a Non-Aligned Movement is unlikely. And this for three reasons. First, the global south is not a homogeneous or united category. Refers to the Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, Middle East, and Asia regions (including the West, Central, South, and Southeast regions); and also China, which sometimes identifies itself as a country from the global south. It is unrealistic to expect a uniform response from such a broad category. Despite this, there are some general trends, especially in the response to the pandemic and the conflict in Ukraine.
Cultural and geographic differences aside, there is also a growing disparity between a powerful South and a poor South. Emerging powers that identify with the global south, such as China, India, Brazil, South Africa and Turkey, not to mention the oil-rich countries of the Gulf region, have very different standards of living and future prospects than most African countries. They are unlikely to develop a common platform for coordinating policies and approaches beyond a vague level of generality.
Second, the relationship between some of the major countries in the global south is competitive. The main example is India and China. Although both claim to be the voice of developing countries, they often differ in their positions within the world order and their attitudes towards it.
Those differences go beyond differences in their political systems: democracy in the case of India and authoritarianism in China. They also extend to your perceived international status. China is sometimes referred to as a superpower; India's claim to being a great power is not universally accepted, and China has sometimes, if not always, excluded India from its "great power" category. From a strategic point of view, India has become very close to the US, while China has moved away from that country and maintains a very competitive relationship with it. When it comes to global governance, China and India have similar aspirations and stances, with a shared commitment to a more just and equitable world order through reform of the existing system of multilateral governance. However, China opposes India's permanent membership in the United Nations Security Council. Similar clashes can be found in the aspirations to the leadership of multilateral cooperation in Latin America (Brazil against Argentina) and Africa (South Africa against Nigeria) and the Middle East (Turkey against Egypt, Iran against Saudi Arabia).
Third, by taking advantage of these differences, Western powers can use the divide-and-conquer approach to thwart the resurgence of a cohesive bloc of non-aligned countries. They could do so through economic aid, arms transfers and security guarantees, which are offered to countries in the global south in highly differentiated ways.
Rather than a powerful and proactive Non-Alignment 2.0, what might be more likely and far-reaching are efforts by countries in the global south to develop regionalized orders. By regional orders I mean not only regional organizations such as the European Union, the African Union, or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), but also informal agreements born of interactions between regional powers that limit, and even eliminate, the influence of extra-regional powers. While some great powers may try to achieve this through exclusive regional spheres of influence (think Russia and China), others (particularly small and medium-sized ones) may seek accommodative and communal regional orders, such as Indonesia through ASEAN.
The pandemic and the conflict between Russia and Ukraine could revitalize the spirit of the Non-Aligned Movement, but not its institutional form. Instead of large groups of like-minded countries like the Non-Aligned Movement or the Commonwealth (whose future has been clouded by the death of Queen Elizabeth II), cooperation continued.
It will become pluralized with the emergence of regional and plurilateral institutions and various forms of complex and hybrid agreements between state and non-state actors, such as companies, foundations and social movements. This trend towards G-plus governance will not displace the current state-centric structure of the UN or the different Gs, such as the G-7 or the G-20, but it will give it some competition.
Amitav Acharya is a professor at American University, Washington (D.C.)
