The leaders of Russia, India and China often wax poetic about establishing a “multipolar” world — although it is far from clear what such a system would entail.
The three countries along with Iran and North Korea regularly lead calls for a new world order that sees a reduced role for the US and its Western allies. However, beyond their shared desire to see a reduction in Western domination in global affairs, proponents offer few strands that bind their vision of the future, experts said. Regardless, the term — and the sentiment — is likely to be here to stay.
“We must jointly advocate for an equal and orderly multipolar world,” Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) said during a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) this month.
Illustration: Mountain People
“All participants ... are committed to the formation of a fair multipolar world order,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said at the same summit.
In late last year, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared: “The new world order is multipolar.”
In speeches, Putin often frames the Russian invasion of Ukraine as less a war of conquest and more a fight to beat back US hegemony in Europe. The idea is likely to strike a chord with Beijing, which has been steadily expanding its footprint across the Asia-Pacific region, where the US has long been dominant.
“There is the common vision of pushing for the end of the Western age,” French political analyst Jean-Marc Balencie said.
However, how exactly that would be achieved remains largely undefined, and “this allows for several scenarios, because leaders often have contradictory interests”, Balencie said.
“Many of the BRICS and SCO countries say they wish to build a multipolar world and are taking significant actions to that end,” said Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, referring to groupings of countries from the so-called Global South. “I doubt that these countries know exactly what kind of order, especially what kind of institutional forms, they seek to realize in 20 years’ time,” Wertheim said.
Official doctrines published by the Kremlin, New Delhi and China are often full of striking promises about shaking up geopolitics.
“We must build partnerships in which countries treat each other on an equal footing,” reads one statement from China last year, framing its proposals “for a shared future.”
Russia says it wants to promote “the world majority” against the so-called “golden billion” of the West — a conspiracy theory, popular in Russia, that a secret global elite hoards the world’s resources.
Russian political scientist Sergei Karaganov said that developing more institutions like BRICS and SCO for countries representing the majority of the global population is vital.
Increased cooperation across tech platforms and deepening ties in the education and scientific fields were also necessary, he adds.
However, such simplistic formulas often ignore geopolitical fault lines across the globe.
In Southeast Asia, China’s growing influence has worried its smaller neighbors, while the West has increasingly turned to India to act as a hedge against Beijing’s growing boldness. In the former Soviet states, Russia’s influence is also a source of anxiety for many, and while Russia has chosen a total break with Washington and Europe after invading Ukraine, no other power has been as keen to follow its path.
The “Global South encompasses so many countries and blocs with their own interests,” Stimson Center China and East Asia program codirector Yun Sun said.
What a multipolar world looks like in practice is fraught with unknowns.
On the economic front, the Kremlin and China remain keen to see a new currency replace the US dollar as the primary vehicle for trade. However, would New Delhi be eager to exchange greenbacks for the yuan? Is there any country ready to build substantial reserves with the unstable ruble?
For many countries, multipolarity offers “alternatives to going head-to-head with the West,” Balencie said.
“Small countries want to maintain their sovereignty while obtaining security and economic assistance from larger powers,” Wertheim added.
Faced with joining competing Cold War-style alliances, they “may be able to play the blocs off each other, but they will also be vulnerable to falling under the control of their patron,” he said.
Yun said that “the word multipolarity suggests equality, but it is misleading.”
China, India and Russia “might be unhappy with certain aspects of the US dominance, but it doesn’t mean they share the exact same vision as for what the alternative should look like,” Yun said.
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