Has the unipolar world finally come to an end?

The Post-Western World and the Rise of a Parallel Order

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...rather than directly confronting existing institutions, rising powers—led by China—are quietly crafting the initial building blocks of what we may call a “parallel order” that will initially complement, and later possibly challenge, today’s international institutions. This order is already in the making; it includes, among others, institutions such as the BRICS-led New Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (to complement the World Bank), Universal Credit Rating Group (to complement Moody’s and S&P), China Union Pay (to complement Mastercard and Visa), CIPS (to complement SWIFT), the BRICS (to complement the G7), and many other initiatives. These structures do not emerge because China and others have fundamentally new ideas about how to address global challenges or because they seek to change global rules and norms; rather, they create them to better project their power, just as Western actors have done before them

Not entirely true the last point; China and others, like Russia facing barbaric Western spiteful sanctions, have had to create new institutions that are rigged to favour certain countries. Case in point: the IMF has long had a policy of refusing to loan to states that default on state-to-state loans. Except Russia now, it seems. Ukraine gets another 3 billion tranche from the IMF ... and still reneges on billions it owes to Russia. That's western imperialism for you. So new institutions are a necessity.

The last here is good:

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... while the transition to genuine multipolarity—not only economically but also militarily and regarding agenda-setting capacity—will be disconcerting to many, it may be, in the end, far more democratic than any previous order in global history, allowing greater levels of genuine dialogue, broader spread of knowledge, and more innovative and effective ways to address global challenges in the coming decades.

More from Valdai ... from a Canadian participant.

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The 24th Valdai paper argues for a new academic discipline, geopolitical economy, which is better to understand the multipolar world, reconstruct its historical evolution and assess its progressive potential.

With growth in China and other emerging economies spreading productive and political power far beyond its original strongholds in the West and Japan, the idea that the world is fast becoming multipolar should be uncontroversial. But nevertheless, to the author’s mind, the two disciplines that study world affairs in the Western world, international relations (IR) and international political economy (IPE), failed to anticipate or explain this phenomenon. The author suggests to found a new discipline – geopolitical economy, best suited to informing institutions and practices that might exploit multipolarity’s potential for a more equal and just world.

The author of the article is Radhika Desai, Professor at the Department of Political Studies, Director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group, University of Manitoba,Winnipeg, Canada.

from the author ...

"With growth in China and other emerging economies spreading productive and political power far beyond its original strongholds in the west and Japan, the idea that the world is fast becoming multipolar, if it isn’t already, should be uncontroversial. But it isn’t. The two disciplines that study world affairs in the western world, international relations (IR), which focuses only on politics and international political economy (IPE), which was founded in the 1970s with the explicit purpose of taking account of economics, failed to anticipate or explain multipolarity. And once compelled to confront it in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, which, by miring the west in stagnation while the emerging economies continued their fast growth, accelerated the advance of multipolarity, they have responded largely with denial and hostility, rather than equanimity and inquiry. Insisting on the reality and/or desirability of US and western supremacy against mounting evidence, they cannot discern the progressive potential of multipolarity. No surer sign of the obsolescence of these disciplines can be had.

This paper argues for a new academic discipline, geopolitical economy, which is better able to understand the multipolar world, reconstruct its historical evolution and assess its progressive potential. The following sections make the case for it and outline its key elements: the centrality of states’ economic roles in the modern world or what I call ‘the materiality of nations’, the dialectic of uneven and combined development (UCD) between them, how it has led to multipolarity and what potential for progressive change it contains."

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