In a recent survey of international relations scholars, the venerable journal Foreign Affairs found a wide spread of opinions in response to the question of whether today's world could be described as unipolar. This illustrates the difficulties of trying to analyze with these categories the current condition of a changing world. That said, and regardless of whether we describe it as unipolar, bipolar or multipolar, there is little doubt that, at the beginning of the third decade of the new century, the global south reemerges with singular force. What is the meaning of this for the international system? What are the demands that developing countries present to the established international order, and what are the origins of their dissatisfaction with it? What are the implications of the reappearance of non-alignment, this time in a new incarnation, as active non-alignment, in the current situation?
The purpose of this article is to answer these questions by examining the roots of the changes in the international system, the direction in which they point, and the driving forces that drive them. A first section analyzes the rise of the Brics, described by some as “the acronym that defined the decade without a name” (the first of the 21st century); The second clears up the year 2016, as a turning point in the crisis of the liberal international order (OLI) that had governed since 1945, that is, since the end of the Second World War, today already in an advanced degree of decomposition; a third considers the birth of what I call the second cold war, this time between the US and China; a fourth details the war in Ukraine as a catalyst for the new momentum that non-alignment is taking in Africa, Asia and Latin America; a fifth describes the features of active non-alignment and what it means for the course of international relations of our time.
The reason why it has been said that the first decade of the new century would be the decade of the Brics is because the emergence of the group was one of the few good news in a decade that began with the attack on the Twin Towers in New York in September 2001, and closed with the financial crisis of 2008-2009, originating on Wall Street.
What was notable, and something that illustrates the power of the word, was that the term itself (BRIC in its original formulation, and which would become Brics with the incorporation of South Africa in 2010), was coined by a banker, Jim O'Neill from Goldman Sachs, in 2001. Its purpose was to place bonds from emerging economies in the markets. For this, a small group of countries with vast territories, significant populations and extensive natural resources was selected. And so, four countries from three continents, with very little in common, and that no one until then would have thought could be grouped into a single entity, ended up together. This culminated in the first diplomatic summit, in Yekaterinburg, Russia, in 2009, and with the formal incorporation of South Africa in 2010.
The Brics are largely emblematic of the new south, so different from the third world of yesteryear. A small group of emerging powers, with abundant resources. They are also due to the West's reluctance to recognize the rise of the global south. During its early years, the Brics were minimized by Western analysts as an entity with no reason to exist. Its heterogeneity (grouping authoritarian regimes with representative democracies) and supposed diversity of interests would give it a short life, it was said. The presence of Russia in the group caused special irritation in Western capitals, given its alleged status, not as an emerging power, but as a declining power, which would not give it the right to associate with them. This, of course, denies the agency and coalition-building capacity of the southern countries.
Another initial criticism of the Brics was that it would not have the resources with which to back up its high-sounding statements about the state of the world, giving it the character of a mere talk shop. However, this changed in 2015 with the founding of the New Development Bank (the so-called Brics Bank) with headquarters in Shanghai and a capital of 50 billion dollars, a bank that in its eight years of existence has been well evaluated by the credit agencies and the press. In any case, the policy of Western countries towards the Brics did not change. Its existence continued to be ignored, with the annual summits receiving little coverage in the mainstream international media.
However, in 2023, nineteen countries, including Argentina, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia, were reported to have applied for admission to the Brics. That same year, the former president of Brazil, Dilma Rou¬sseff, assumed the presidency of the Development Bank, raising her profile and underscoring Brazil's renewed commitment, now under the Government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, to the Brics.
The rise of this emblematic group of the new south, in turn, has gone hand in hand with the OLI crisis, shaken to its foundations in 2016. It was precisely in 2015 and in the first half of 2016 that conventional wisdom in The large international press and international relations magazines began to express that the Brics would have had their moment of glory, but that the time had come for serious countries (read the US and the United Kingdom) to take charge of global economic governance, something for which “upstart powers” like those in the global south – in the words of one prominent analyst – “were not ready for prime time.” The emerging powers would have neither the diplomatic traditions, nor the bureaucratic capacity, nor the leadership of the Anglo-Saxon powers to take charge of steering the world political economy, all virtues that would abound in Washington and London.
And in that, this somewhat outdated narrative crashed into harsh reality. In June 2016, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, beginning a process that would absorb London and Brussels for four years, in one of the most self-destructive decisions made by any country in the recent past. In seven years, the United Kingdom would have four prime ministers, and in 2023 projections indicate that the United Kingdom will have the worst performance of any European economy, with negative growth of 0.7%.
And in June of that year, the US elected Donald Trump as president, with an isolationist and anti-immigrant platform. Soon, the US would abandon the Trans-Pacific Agreement, the Paris Agreement and finally, in the midst of the Covid pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) itself. He also paralyzed the World Trade Organization (WTO), by refusing to appoint members of its appeals body, something that has not changed under President Biden.
The illusion that the future of the international order would be in the best hands if left in those of countries led by a Donald Trump or a Boris Johnson was shattered. This was only ratified by the disastrous handling of the Covid pandemic by both the US and the United Kingdom. According to official figures, the US had the highest number of deaths from the pandemic (with more than one million) and the United Kingdom the highest number of deaths in Europe (with 225,000). The initial refusal of both the US and Europe to cooperate with the rest of the world on anti-Covid vaccines did not help to convey confidence in the leadership of the transatlantic powers, increasingly focused on their own problems and consumed by a strong anti-foreigner and anti-globalization sentiment.
And it is in this framework that tensions between the US and China began to escalate, going from a trade and technological war, at the beginning of the Trump Administration, to one with ideological and military overtones under President Biden. To the lack of leadership of the international order by Western powers, and a marked lack of interest in the production of global public goods, is thus added a strong ideologization of international relations. Developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America are pressured to choose between the US and China on trade, investments and projects, adding an additional obstacle to the already difficult task of development, in years , of the worst pandemic in a century.
Latin America thus finds itself between a rock and a hard place, leading to the cancellation of important projects such as a submarine cable between Valparaíso and Shanghai, the suspension of the start of work on the fourth bridge over the Panama Canal and a railway project. in that same country, as well as limitations in digital connectivity throughout the region, due to Washington's opposition to the presence of the Chinese telecommunications company, Huawei, which has the cutting-edge 5G technology in the field.
In response, in Latin America, already in 2020, this leads to the emergence of active non-alignment (NAA) as a foreign policy doctrine to face this difficult situation, and to the publication of a collective volume edited by Carlos Fortin, Jorge Heine and Carlos Ominami, Active non-alignment and Latin America: a doctrine for the new century (Catalonia, 2021). She takes a page from the NAM (Non-Aligned Movement) of the sixties and seventies, but adapts it to the realities of the new century, in which the GDP in terms of purchasing power parity of the Brics is higher than that of the G-7, and in which the World Bank identifies the transfer of wealth from the North Atlantic to the Asia-Pacific as one of the main events of our time. The NAA calls on the countries of the region to put their own interests at the forefront, and not to take sides a priori with any of the great powers.
Beyond Latin America, however, the war in Ukraine came to underscore the growing differences between the global north and south. The invasion of Ukraine by Russia on February 24, 2022 was described by President Biden as a watershed and an indicator that the main fissure in the world today was between democracies and autocracies, with the former supporting Ukraine and NATO, and the second to Russia. However, given that some of the most populous democracies on the planet, such as India, Indonesia, Pakistan, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico and Argentina, have maintained their neutrality in the conflict, this approach is difficult to sustain. 85% of the world's population lives in countries that do not support diplomatic and economic sanctions against Russia.
How to explain this seemingly counterintuitive reaction?
The reason is very simple. What there is in many medium powers of the global south is a rejection of the hegemonic power (USA) and an increasingly dysfunctional and inoperative international order. This supposedly rules-based international order, which is incapable of solving key global challenges such as global warming, pandemics such as Covid and other dangers to the subsistence of humanity such as nuclear proliferation, but in which the great powers live obsessed with their fight for primacy, without caring what happens to the rest.
Many countries in the global south consider that this post-war international order was imposed on them in moments of weakness, when they had just gained independence, and that the system favors the great Western powers. The power of the dollar and the indiscriminate use of embargoes, financial and economic sanctions on countries like North Korea, Cuba, Iran and Syria under the pretext of human rights reasons, while giving unrestricted support to tyrannies like Saudi Arabia, generates resentment. To a large extent, the sanctions against Russia are the straw that broke the camel's back.
And so non-alignment re-emerges, now in a new incarnation as active non-alignment. On the one hand there is a rejection of the effort of the G-7 and NATO to transform a European war into a global war. On the other hand, it is also a reaction to the current existing order and the way in which it is manipulated, in this perspective, for the benefit of Western countries.
One of the most hackneyed phrases in recent years has been “not supporting NATO in the war in Ukraine is equivalent to condoning an unprecedented violation of the rules-based world order.” If this is allowed, some add, “the world will never be the same again.” Strictly speaking, the Western powers and NATO itself violate these same rules on a regular basis – in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Yemen, to limit ourselves to the most recent examples – so the phrase has little credibility.
Beyond violations of sovereignty and the principle of non-intervention, the OLI has been making losses everywhere, and the reaction of many countries in the global south to the calls of the G-7 and NATO also expresses this disenchantment with an order which, without counting its initial vices, has become almost a caricature of itself.
In institutional terms, the refusal of the great powers to reform the UN Security Council, and to put an end to anomalies such as the exclusion of India (the most populous country on the planet) from the P-5 of permanent members, and the maintenance in the The United Kingdom itself, a declining power no matter where you look at it, has led to questions about the legitimacy of the UN structures. The same goes for the unwritten rule that the president of the World Bank will be an American and the managing director of the IMF a European (preferably French). The gap between the realities of the world of the new century and these ossified obstacles of 1945 could not be greater.
What this order has changed is in its unusual denial of free trade and globalization, both ancient pillars of it. After three decades in which the growing flows of trade and investment throughout the planet brought enormous progress and advancement in many countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, the Western powers, led by the US and the Kingdom United, they withdraw into themselves, and embrace protectionism and anti-globalization discourse as a mantra, renouncing what they once adored, among other things, because globalization ended up favoring some southern countries.
At the same time, the growing instrumentalization of the US dollar as a weapon of economic war, using it for embargoes and sanctions against Washington's adversaries, giving an almost universal currency a warlike character, has exposed the vulnerability of the rest of the planet to the whims of decision makers in Washington. Promoting the use of alternative international currencies such as the yuan has thus acquired more urgency every day.
A world with a more equitable distribution of power, one of a multiplex nature in the expression of Amitav Acharya, would allow progress towards less biased international practices and regimes. They would take more into account the provision of global financial, food, health and environmental public goods. They would not be centered on the obsessive fixation of the great powers on the primacy of one over another, to the exclusion of all other considerations.
It is to such an order that the global south aspires, and hence the resurgence of non-alignment, now in a new incarnation, as active non-alignment.
Jorge Heine is a professor of International Relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University.
