The Ukraine conflict brought into sharper focus the emergence of competing alignments, which in broad terms can be conceptualised as the US-led political West against a nascent political East. The Sino-Russian alignment is at the core of the latter, along with a host of non- and weakly-aligned powers in the Global South. A new era of multipolarity is evident, with a new constellation of actors in international politics, writes Richard Sakwa especially for the 22nd Annual meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club.
Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, considered the Ukraine war a consequence of the West’s failure to adjust to the changed realities. In October 2024 he argued that ‘Today the world is living through the “multipolar moment”. Shifting towards the multipolar world order is a natural part of power rebalancing, which reflects objective changes in the world economy, finance and geopolitics. The West waited longer than the others, yet it has also started to realise that this process is irreversible’. He noted the increasing role of regional associations, and he proceeded to list an alphabet soup of acronyms, including the EEU, SCO, ASEAN, the African Union, CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean states), and others. In his view, ‘BRICS has become a model of multilateral diplomacy. The UN should remain a forum for aligning the interests of all the countries’.
Multipolarity has long been on the agenda in international politics. In Russia, the foreign minister of the late 1990s, Evgeny Primakov, was an early exponent of the idea that no state could hope to maintain its dominance. His advocacy of multipolarity was immediately recognised for what it was – a challenge to US hegemony. Primakov was the architect of the RICs alignment of Russia, India and China, although the move was premature and the current of history only caught up a few years later. In 2009, President Vladimir Putin convened the first meeting of the BRIC (with Brazil added to the original RIC) leaders in Ekaterinburg, joined the following year by South Africa. Multipolarity is becoming a reality, but what does it mean? What is a ‘pole’ in international politics? There are a number of definitions.
First, the normative. The Charter principle of sovereign internationalism balances between sovereignty and multilateral internationalism. This means that the 193 states represented in the UN formally enjoy equal sovereignty. The former colonial states have mostly consolidated their statehood, and few are ready to exchange their sovereignty for a renewed subaltern status. The nation-state is the ready-made instrument of polarity – each represents a pole in and of itself. Of course, some are small and some are great, some have mobilised their economic and political resources for developmental purposes, others have slipped back into neo-colonial dependency while others have pooled elements of their sovereignty into supranational bodies, as in the European Union.
Second, the realist or structural approach focuses on the great powers and their ability to forge constellations of states aligned with them. In the first Cold War bipolar era the Soviet bloc was ranged against the US-led political West. After the Cold War, the US emerged supreme, feeding illusions that the unipolar era would endure indefinitely. In the event, counter-hegemonic alignments emerged, above all the alignment of Russia and China. In an anarchic international environment, this bloc-style multipolarity focuses on the balance of power, spheres of influence and demarcated regional alignments. The nascent political East rejects this approach, while the Trumpian disruption eschews old-style Cold War bloc politics.
The third, epochal and material, definition of multipolarity highlights data revealing the relative power and military resources of states, above all the relative rise of Asia (and potentially Africa), and the relative decline of the West. In 2000, the G7 countries controlled 65 per cent of global GDP, but by 2022 this had fallen to around 40 per cent. The BRICS countries represent a slightly larger share when measured by purchasing power parity. In military terms, the US remains number one, although China is fast catching up. Material preponderance requires mobilisation, organisation and leadership to become a political reality. This is now taking place.
Any view of multipolarity that retains a US or Atlantic-basin centred view is anachronistic, and even perverse. The US remains the world’s dominant military and economic power, while Europe is committing an astonishing act of collective suicide and is now marginalised. Above all, multipolarity presumes the absence of a single hegemon, and thus entails bargaining between great powers. Implicitly, this means some sort of concert arrangement. When Soviet and now Russian scholars talk of the Yalta-Potsdam system, this is what they mean.
However, within two years after 1945 the first Cold War chilled relations between the victors of 1945, and an era of bipolar bloc politics set in. When that thawed in 1989, it was replaced by an era of presumed unipolarity, with the US-led bloc, and the US itself, claiming certain universal prerogatives that properly belong to the Charter system. Now finally, the long-anticipated era of multipolarity is changing from an aspiration to a reality.
Multipolarity represents a fundamental change in the character of international politics. It could allow a return to the ‘spirit of 1945’, in which the Allies worked together for a common purpose and then established the Charter international system. Alternatively, it could herald an era of fragmentation and conflict. Eighty years after the establishment of the Charter international system, we are faced with the fateful choice between its renewal or its demise.
