The Ukrainian war has been an electric shock to the world order. It changes the nature of the European project, militarizes the West and makes visible the emergence of a global South that refuses to take sides. It has forced China to position itself, pushes Russia towards Asia and reopens doubts about the future of Eastern Europe. The war has had an impact on energy and food and draws a picture of a less globalized world in which relations between China and the United States have accelerated their deterioration.
In some cases, the war has not been the trigger for the changes, but the event that has accelerated them. “The situation that remains is very complex. You can not talk about blocks or cold war. Within each side there are fractures. Europeans and Americans disagree on the long term and the future of Russia. China shares the Russian narrative, but it is not as involved as Moscow wants…” says Pol Morillas, director of Cidob (Barcelona Center for International Affairs).
Europe has undergone the most drastic changes. The Russian invasion (more than 100,000 men) has caused 8 million refugees on the continent. It has reactivated NATO and has skyrocketed the Union's Defense budgets. “Even in countries that are not threatened,” says Vicenç Fisas, an analyst. For Morillas, “Europe's reaction has been revolutionary compared to what it had in the wars in Iraq or the Balkans. They have approved sanctions, they have created funds for the purchase of arms…” The economist Josep Oliver, in contrast, considers that the displacement of the center of gravity towards the East, dismasts Europe. “When I listen to Poles, Balts and Nordics speak, it is hard for me to recognize what remains of the European project”. And he clinches: “What holds Europe up is the European Central Bank. When the economy gets worse, we'll talk."
Energy is the field that best reflects the European contradictions. In the spring of 2022, Putin cut off the gas tap to put pressure on a continent that bought 40% of its consumption from him. Inflation soared and so did interest rates. But the recession that economists had predicted has stalled. Today Europe buys the gas it needs from the United States and the Middle East and continues to be dependent on abroad. “Europe has played the Russian gas and renewable energy card for years. But that was a fantasy –says Mariano Marzo, professor of Energy Resources-. With the war, the lack of strategic autonomy has become evident. Today the king is naked. Marzo summarizes that "the continent has always had a hard time understanding that energy is power."
The war has caught Germany off guard. Cheap Russian gas and China's avid buyers made possible the miracle that made it the world's leading exporting power. “Wander durch Handel” was the philosophy that guided that miracle, peace through trade. Today German pacifism, the fruit of a long digestion of its Nazi past, seems obsolete. Now Germany sends tanks to Ukraine. “The German elite is baffled. It has been seventy years of a policy that has blown up,” says Oliver. Germany was proof that you didn't have to be a military power to survive in the global world. Today few would share that type of certainty.
For Fisas, that is the worst legacy of the war. “A militaristic discourse has been recovered that leaves no door open to peace. We have returned to the speeches of the cold war ”he says. “This war will not be won on the military field. It can last many years. And it will end up at a negotiating table” says this expert in peace processes. Fisas proposes to return to the Minsk talks, which the two parties held in 2014 after the first Russian offensive (occupation of Crimea and intervention in Donbass). “We have a very close look at the map of Ukraine and what is Eurasia. We have to rethink that area because we have lost the possibility of a shared security in Europe”.
The conflict has sown doubts about how the transition in the East was closed after German reunification and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990 and 1991. The one who feeds these doubts is Vladimir Putin, when he says that Russia was deceived by the West, by extending the NATO to the East. This week he has linked Russia's survival to victory in Ukraine. “The future of Eastern Europe was made clear with the Helsinki Agreements,” says Morillas. What remained unclear is Russia's role as an international power. Now he wants to get that status back."
The economist Branko Milanovic has written that Western sanctions are returning Russia to the economy of the 1980s (by restricting its access to Western technologies) and that the cycle of opening up to the West that began with Peter the Great in the 19th century XVIII comes to an end. Russia, which has already made it clear that it is a military power, but not an economic one, today looks to the East. “If Russia loses the war, the country will most likely turn to Asia, bet everything on its relationship with China,” Oliver says. But neither should a dismemberment of Russia be excluded.
China is the best kept secret in this whole story. It has been the great economic miracle of the last half century. It has become the rival superpower of the United States. He tries to combine his friendship with Russia with a Europe that he has as a client. “China shares the Russian narrative of the West's guilt,” says Morillas, “but in fact it has not turned to them. China is in its coming of age crisis. She must learn that the decisions of her friends have consequences. And she must get wet ”. On Friday he presented an ambiguous peace plan that the West will reject, but which may win him support in the global South.
According to Oliver, it has been "China's position on the war that has accelerated the deglobalization process." For this professor of Economics, the new international order loomed in 2012, when the Obama administration set the priorities of the United States in the Pacific. "American elites perceive China's strength and identify it as the adversary, above the Middle East and Russia, which were not seen as a threat at the time." According to March, China's strategic advantage is enormous. “They know where they are going. In terms of energy, they will make a slower transition to a green economy than Europe, but they control the minerals that are necessary for that transition."
China's assertion as a superpower has facilitated the emergence of the global South. India, Israel, Brazil or Turkey are medium-sized powers that reject aggression against Ukraine, but that trade with Russia and, like Turkey, offer themselves as mediators. The appearance of this bloc similar to the "non-aligned" of the Cold War of the 1970s, has become visible in the UN votes. At this Munich Conference, Western leaders noted the lack of enthusiasm for their proposals on Ukraine among these countries.
Ivan Krastev, with Anne Applebaum, the best analyst of Eastern Europe, has written this week that the skepticism of those countries in condemning the war is a form of disdain towards Europe. To put it in its place: this is not a global war, they reason, it is a war in Europe, which is no longer the center of the world. "There is a weariness of the global order in the West," admits Morillas. The one who had the mechanisms to make things work until now was the West. Now there are rivals and the rules cannot be the same”. For Fisas, institutions such as the UN will have to adapt. “The method of voting in the assembly will have to be reformed and the Security Council will have to be changed. That will fall before five years.”
The war in Ukraine culminates a series of ruptures that bury the period of neoliberal euphoria and maximum American hegemony that goes from 1989 to 2001, and corresponds to the zenith of globalization. Breaks ranging from the financial crisis of 2008 to populism in the United Kingdom and the US, the climate crisis, the pandemic and, finally, the war. It invites us to think that this succession of events reflects the deterioration of American hegemony and its difficult adjustment to a multipolar world. That said, the United States has reinvigorated a NATO that now demands its attention in the Pacific, sells its gas to Germany and has signed an Inflation Reduction Act that encourages the flight of the old European industry in search of cheaper energy with subsidies. . For a declining power, it's not bad at all.
The war has been a disaster for the poorest populations. Deglobalization, or better the decoupling between China and the United States leads to regional blocs and a more expensive economy. “Breaking with China will not be easy. It means going back to an inflation that we weren't used to” says Oliver.
