Who’s Afraid of a Multipolar World?

The world is not easily divided into coherent political forms, but that is how we tend to make it legible. Liberal democracies, autocratic regimes, petrostates, platform feudalists, oligarchies, international political assemblies, the nation state itself. These archetypes and species of the contemporary political imagination sit somewhere between myths and technologies. Like myths, they carry a narrative structure throughout deep civilisational time. Like technologies, they can be useful for purposes which might have little to do with their nominal intention or meaning. What happens to our beliefs in these political species when the script no longer fits, when the protagonists are hard to locate, and the scenery itself starts melting?

‘Multipolarity’ describes a state in which the loci of power could be more variously distributed across the planet. The Cold War, which divided much of human civilisation between alliances with the United States and the USSR, produced a ‘bipolar’ world of superpower competition. The current era – since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent dissolution of the USSR – is characterised by a ‘unipolar’ order, with the United States as its undisputed hegemon. There is a sense of stability and predictability that comes with a single point of control; the 1990s are often remembered as a decade of relative stability and banal optimism. Famously referred to as ‘the end of history’ by political theorist Francis Fukuyama, the era of American primacy symbolised, for some, the historic victory of capitalist liberal democracy over its ideological alternatives, namely communism and fascism.[1] It’s worth remembering that ‘globalisation’, which has come to generically describe an accelerated exchange of global trade and culture, was once used pejoratively as a euphemism for the spread of US corporate imperialism through the imposition of ‘free trade’ and market capitalism across the world. As the anti-globalisation movement waned in the new millennium, Fukuyama’s diagnosis seemed secure. There was to be no alternative. After all, even communist China was signing up to the World Trade Organisation. The 2007-2008 financial crisis threatened to bottom out the system, but thanks to China’s propulsive growth, it didn’t, and the US bailing out its banks and its allies all but reinforced its primacy as the world’s pole of power.

This doesn’t mean that the US gets carte blanche, but it does get to shape the rules of the ‘rules-based international order’, whether through sanctions, tariffs, soft power, diplomacy, or military intervention. The globalisation of American optimism gave us the World Wide Web, MTV, The Simpsons, iPhones and Ivy League-trained economists, politicians, social scientists, and engineers in positions of power and influence everywhere. As the dust settles on the first decades of the 21st century, this era might be remembered as a chapter of crusading liberal hubris: a heartfelt belief that the ideologies underpinning American primacy are not only good for America, but good for you, too – even if America is bludgeoning you with them.

In much of the West, the past three decades were marked by accelerated de-industrialisation and a shift towards financialisation as a source of growth, while cheap goods came from elsewhere. At the same time, non-Western nations gradually redressed the international balance of trade, particularly as China turned from the world’s manufacturer to its most voracious consumer, in turn pushing production to labour markets elsewhere. Meanwhile, American economic growth stayed strong, especially relative to Europe – its GDP only overtook the Eurozone in 2008 and stands at over one and a half times the latter’s size today. However, economic heft alone was not enough to maintain legitimacy, foreign and domestic, for the US. It was piling up morally and politically costly interventions across the world while inequalities burgeoned at home. As the country grasped for something to believe in, only the heroically American success of Silicon Valley’s technology entrepreneurs could fill the yawning void of ideological and cultural optimism. Meanwhile, in recent years, West Virginia’s average life expectancy has drifted south of North Korea’s.[2]

During Donald Trump’s first term in the White House, the centenarian statesman Henry Kissinger ventured that “Trump may be one of those figures in history who comes from time to time to mark the end of an era and force it to give up on its old pretences.”[3] In the anti-liberal era of Trump, Brexit and a surging populist right, it was getting more difficult to see how the Washington-led West could continue to preach universal values with a straight face. The unipolar order could rumble on for some time, materially – the US was not going anywhere fast – but it was no longer the imaginary keeper of the end of history.

For some, these contradictions were already baked into the later decades of the 20th century. Wang Huning, a conservative intellectual in the highest echelons of the Chinese Community Party, was a young politics professor when he published America Against America, a Tocquevillian account of the US written over a six-month trip taken across the country in the late 1980s. Observing its exemplary capitalist society and its remarkable economic success with the eye of an alien ethnographer, Wang marvels at the US’s technological achievements and ponders whether its commodified politics, fraying social fabric and racial inequities can sustain a coherent society.[4] Returning to Beijing shortly before the Tiananmen Square crisis unfolded, he went on to advise three premierships and never returned to the US again.

In the search for alternatives to hegemony, the prospect of multipolarity makes strange bedfellows of conservatives, reactionaries, revolutionaries, and anti-colonial thinkers alike, in their critique of imperialism and the moral hypocrisies that laboured under the ethos of liberal universalism. As Frantz Fanon wrote, “it so happens that when the native hears a speech about Western culture he pulls out a knife – or at least makes sure it is within reach.”[5] Edward Said argued that orientalism was not only a “rationalisation of colonial rule” but an ideology that “justified in advance”, in moral terms, the violent domination it sought.[6] The decolonial philosopher Sylvia Wynter carefully traced the ontology of European racism, from the theological supremacy of conquistadors to the instrumentalisation of modern science, as a hierarchical “order of man” which sanctified Europe’s extermination of ‘barbarian others’ and its ‘improvement’ of their lands.[7]

If we take a trip along the ideological horseshoe, we find that their assiduous critiques are echoed by rightwing critics of the Western world order. Aleksandr Dugin, the far-right Russian philosopher who has long expounded a ‘theory of a multipolar world’, excoriates the “racist virus of universalism” by which “Western man […] generalises his ethnocentrism to megalomaniacal proportions”.[8] While Dugin’s objection is justifiably grounded in a critique of the nation state and a deconstruction of modernity, his solution is one of nativist, civilisational essentialism. His theory proposes a plurality of political and cultural regimes operating within strict civilisational borders in accordance with historical spheres of power: the West, Chinese-Confucian, the Islamic world, the Slavic sphere, and so on. Dugin’s everted identity politics draws from Samuel Huntington’s 1993 ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis, which argued that civilisational differences, rather than ones of political ideology, would shape future conflicts. But the ‘clash’ itself is less a prognosis than an ideological choice, or – worse – a self-fulfilling narrative, flattening an already-diasporic planet into a romanticised, ahistorical and racist fairy tale of essential cultural differences. Driven by historical pride and grievance, as well as the notion that a select number of great empires should rise again, it is the worst of all possible multipolar worlds.

The deserved critique of universalism too often leaves the door open to nativism, as seen in populist, nationalist and ethno-religious revivals the world over, not least in the US today. To find a meaningful alternative, perhaps we need to complicate the dichotomy between empire and national independence. Earlier in the last century, the nation state was a political technology that offered to fulfil post-colonial countries’ aspirations for sovereignty and self-determination. One scholar noted in 1973 that over two thirds of the world’s national constitutions had been drafted in the previous three decades.[9] These new states, typically poorer and weaker than their older peers, sought to form alliances that would protect them against the geopolitical gravity of superpowers.

The Afro-Asian conference in 1955, for example, was a forerunner of contemporary multipolar imaginaries. Better known as the Bandung Conference after its Indonesian host city, it sought to build new alliances, unaligned with the US-USSR axis, between nations of the Global South. The majority of its participants had only recently become independent from European empires. In a period of unprecedented geopolitical uncertainty, apprehension and tentative optimism, the ‘Bandung moment’ became emblematic of fraternity between post-colonial nations. Observing the summit, the African-American journalist and communist Richard Wright opined that the participants of this meeting, who represented over a billion people, had nothing in common except for “what their past relationship to the Western world had made them feel”.[10] Bandung was a symbol which pre-empted later efforts such as the Non-Aligned Movement and the New International Economic Order. For all its aspirations, it was ultimately a failure. Many of the participants eventually reneged on their commitment to non-alignment by siding with the US or USSR as the Cold War deepened, while other alliances were riven by interstate rivalries. Decolonisation from the old empires, it turned out, was necessary but insufficient for autonomy in the global order.

In today’s tempestuous world, we might again ask whether common enemies can produce lasting solidarities. The contours of a multipolar world to come emerge from a tipping of the balance of political and economic power, most notably towards China. This emerging political geography also reflects material transformations in the world’s sources of energy and technological advantage, as well as supply chain chokepoints and spatial asymmetries in access to natural resources. Less optimistic by half than the youthful members of the Bandung meeting, the new multipolarity might be built on ‘negative cosmopolitanism’. The global majority may build alliances and accord on a foundation of shared grievance, rather than a common vision. While welcomed by many, signs of the US’s weakening hegemony are met with a mood of nervousness and suspicion over what might follow. Unprecedented uncertainty hangs over a world of fragile social contracts, oligarchs old and new, discredited international legal regimes, and scrambled ideologies. At the same time, in this truly ‘globalised’ scene of mutually assured destruction and climate crisis, where extreme heat on one continent can trigger failed harvests and uprisings on another, and where atrocities travel the world at the speed of memes, our fates are much too bound within a planetary entanglement for terrestrial nationalism to hold. As philosopher Achille Mbembe once said, “the difference with the old times is that today we cannot escape the inextricability of the world”.[11]

The Chinese philosopher Zhao Tingyang offers one alternative to the world of nations, appropriating the historic Chinese concept of tianxia, which translates as ‘all under heaven’, to propose a foundational political philosophy that “stands in contrast to the Greek polis as the political starting point of European culture”.[12] Drawing from Confucian thinkers, this concept supposes “an ‘order of coexistence’ wherein the whole world is the basic unit of politics”. While Zhao cautions that his is a philosophical framework and not a political programme, he points to a conceptual lineage that might answer contemporary aspirations for a politics based on something other than ‘realist’ competition between Westphalian nation states.[13] Rather, in tianxia, what’s good for one cannot be good unless it’s good for all. Critics remark that this borderless, de-individualised, utopian story of cooperating nations sounds an awful lot like a benevolent Chinese empire. Others argue that ‘race’ and ‘imperialism’ took uniquely violent, expansionist and evangelical forms as practised by the West over much of the past millennium, and that other political ontologies have presided over eras of harmony in world history.[14] Perhaps for too long, oppositional conceptions such as Thomas Hobbes’ ‘war of all against all’ or Carl Schmitt’s ‘friend versus enemy’ distinction have dominated our understanding of politics.[15] Tianxia offers a narrative beyond the borders of the nation – a legal fiction eroded from without and fragmented from within – in a pluralistic world in which inextricability must be the starting point, not the end, of the political.

Rather than contend with the utopianism of united world governance or the reactionary idealism of civilisational essence, we could start from the realities of our present and the narrow paths to relative peace and stability it affords. Effective global ecological governance, for instance, will be essential to mitigate the worst of the climate crisis, and be a key source of political legitimacy.[16] The variegated impacts of climate change mean that types of localities – such as dense cities, desertifying landscapes or agricultural regions spread across the planet – have more in common with one another than their immediate national surroundings, further undermining nation-based frameworks.[17] The failures of multilateral climate action and the challenges of industrial transformations necessary for climate transition have also catalysed the unraveling of political dichotomies. Illiberal regimes such as Saudi Arabia and China might well take on the progressive mantle of climate infrastructure investment and the production of transition technologies.[18] Here again, the US, the world’s largest gas exporter, is caught in a bind between its moral self-image and the sources of its prosperity – a Gordian Knot cut,[19] inelegantly but decisively, by MAGA. At the time of writing, President Donald Trump has just reversed US climate infrastructure subsidies and pulled out of the Paris Climate Agreement,[20] likely tilting the world further towards China, which dominates many of those technologies. More than a simple choice between authoritarianism and democracy, these plausible near-future scenarios demand that we recalibrate our political maps and strategies for the politics to come.

‘Polarity’ is not only a question of objective power, but also one of shared narrative and consent. The more hegemonic power is weaponised – as it has been after the 2007-2008 financial crisis, the Trump-Biden era trade wars, the Russia-Ukraine war and the genocide of Gaza – the less convincing this supposed consent becomes, and the world starts to see through a ‘universalism’ that doesn’t seem to include most people. While the UN General Assembly convenes a notional parliament of nations, its recommendations exercise no binding authority, and the world has grown accustomed to seeing the Assembly vote nearly in unison against the position of the US and its allies. Israel’s war on Gaza, in particular, pits the US and Europe – notably Germany – starkly against the rest of the world. Many of these nations are hardly enemies of the West, but draw the line at abetting a genocide. In one widely circulated cartoon, a man in a Middle Eastern warzone besieged by predator drones says excitedly to his wife, “They say the next one will be sent by a woman!” “Really makes you feel like part of history,” she replies.

“Who’s afraid of a multipolar world?” I wondered aloud to a Ukrainian friend who had recently moved to Kyiv to work on reconstruction planning. “I am,” he replied, without missing a beat.

With the re-election of Donald Trump and the radically reactionary and isolationist US it promises, the world seems set on an accelerated trajectory towards a multipolar system whose participants vie for alternative alliances and competing value systems. “So we have won,” Dugin wrote on 6 November 2024. “Globalists have lost their final combat. The future is finally open. I am really happy.”[21] Jubilantly, he comes to the same analytical conclusion about Trump’s re-election as many liberals, such as the Vox columnist who wrote seethingly, “You’ll miss the liberal international order when it’s gone”.[22] Cue a cascade of replies reminding him of the bombing, rubble and dead children which this order also brought. To be sure, many will miss the protection that US hegemony offered, but in mourning they should not pretend it didn’t die from the inside.

It seems tautological to say that politics consists in the attainment of political ends, but lately, it can seem as though it is all about shaping the narrative. To paraphrase a Chinese Xiaohongshu user’s description of what it means to be a ‘TikTok refugee’, in the US you are free to have opinions, but no choices. With the dwindling of faith in Western liberalism over recent years, and the ideological frailty that followed, reactionary actors have wielded fear, revanchism and nativist mythologies to stunning effect. The inelegant unfolding of a multipolar world will no doubt be drawn by these ideological currents, but it remains to be seen how they will shape the material world beneath. The critics and opponents of these demagogues and reactionaries – who find themselves ever more scattered across old ideological borders – will need to discover contingent and accidental alliances to break the waves. In any case, there is no going back now. To steer new possibilities for multipolarity away from a Duginist fate means building solidarity through interdependence and compromise, based on the material realities we share.