by Guilherme Wilbert for the Saker Blog
With the recent political events involving such different parts of the world, but usually for the same reasons: popular dissatisfaction, rising prices, and the like. And these causes arise with the decision-making errors of Western leaders, who end up suppressing popular opinion, in what generates a kind of democratic government in the archetype but doesn’t really care about its people.
The most practical example arises when countries try to enter into military alliances without popular consultation as to whether the people agree with what is at stake. The Nordics in NATO were a very clear example of this.
The politicians who now manage the finances of powers within Europe were clearly not prepared for what is happening, mainly because in the global production chain, which involves Russia, now sanctioned, reflects much more on the sanctioning regional economy than on the sanctioned one. Plus it destroys on many economic fronts the Global South, which directly receives the reflections of these mistakes.
People who have been put through a bureaucracy because economic power has a lot of money and unfortunately are leading Europe into disaster, but without realizing it the entire Western world as we know it. With recent cases of foreign attempts to interfere in legitimately elected governments to try to stop the advance to the multipolar world, which at this point of the championship has no more brakes.
The recent death of Shinzo Abe, former prime minister of Japan (which until then was considered one of the safest countries in the world), proves that even a supposedly quiet and peaceful nation can be the target of serious terrorist attacks like the one mentioned, and this proves that the unipolarity system is disappearing, even if it takes some along the way, unfortunately.
It was not avoidable, but it could be delayed
The multipolar world was going to emerge one way or another, but the mistakes of the Western leaders accelerated a process that would still take some years, and it can’t cope since it governs for less than 1 billion people (G7 population). And Operation Z in Ukraine was the trigger for a lack of diplomatic tact and will to war that even caused Ukraine’s allied leaders to fall, such as Boris Johnson.
The bankruptcy of Europe was also imminent, since the various economic dependencies, including on Russian gas, prove that the continent, despite being so-called First World, was unable to generate an economy based on a real production of resources. And all attempts to escape from this dependency would lead to at least 10 years of pipeline works and economic agreements-treaties between other countries and them.
So it’s not like it was easy either to have prevented what was predestined to happen, but it could have been delayed if there was the right diplomacy, since the war was avoidable. But how? Simple. I’ll explain.
What was Putin’s key argument? “Ukraine cannot join NATO!”
And what could the West have done? Generated a document in multilateral coordination with the appropriate entities recognizing that the security of Russia, a member of the UN Security Council, was an important issue and Ukraine would not join the Atlanticist military alliance. Or: they could put 50,000 or 100,000 troops inside Kiev to stand up to the Russians since Biden shortly before the Special Military Operation began, acknowledged that Putin would “invade Ukraine,” so they knew the risks. But they did neither.
They wanted this war but it is not going as planned because the political debacle is happening, with the leaders who support the Atlanticist platforms falling away little by little, leaving the enthusiasts of the multipolar world standing like Putin and Xi Jinping in their proper nuclear strongholds.
Moreover, it is interesting to note how parts of the Global South opposed the various diplomatic and economic sanctions on Russia, showing that they were unwilling to continue functioning as American semi-colonies in diplomatic and other matters.
It was inevitable that a totally new world would emerge out of the totally destroyed old world, because that is the natural way of what comes after destruction: reconstruction or new construction. And that is what is happening to the world at present, in that we see prominent leaders being murdered in the open or resignations due to inability of governance, clear signs of destruction.
And after the destruction will come the construction, of which we don’t know what it will look like yet, but the first bricks have already been laid.
The BRICS+ is the only economic bloc capable of guiding the birth of the multipolar world
The BRICS+ unlike any grouping of countries into an economic bloc, has no regional or cultural limitations. On the contrary, countries from all over the world that are so different are aligned in the same multipolar thinking there, in what is seen different if you consider the G7 or NAFTA, which are limiting organizations in their birth, since they don’t carry the discourse of multipolarism ingrained, besides using destabilizing agents such as NATO for a kind of stick to impose their policies on sovereign countries.
The ability to unite so many enthusiasts of the multipolar world will be the driving force of the industrial revolution that we will see happen, which will bring the world into a state of bonanza again because even war will end one day and sanctions will be seen as useless because integration has already begun to happen. Currency baskets are being considered within the BRICS+ to escape the American monetary hegemony, which is a BIG thing!
So, to close the reasoning, I conclude that the multipolar world was something that was inevitably going to happen, but it was accelerated because of the mistakes of its enemies.
Guilherme Wilbert is a law graduate interested in geopolitics and international law.
Its pretty bloody simple. If everyone would just leave each other alone the world would be a much better place. I don’t want some new ‘power’, I just want to be left the hell lone by my own government and especially by other countries Government, that includes the UN, G7, IMF, World Bank etc.
You go to visit another country, trade with another country, you treat their customs and way of life with respect, if you don’t like it don’t visit, don’t immigrate and don’t trade with them.
So sick of everyone telling me what to do.
This article just proposes the current system being replaced with another one, ENOUGH!
Thats correct. The real solution has always been pan-anarchism. Statist ideology will be the final domino to fall in 100-200 years.
Yes China-Russia resistsnce axis is preferable evolution from western hegemony, but it still forces and will force associations and choices on people who choose something else.
The ‘forcing’ is only a short-term measure designed to resist the Unipolar moment. Once Multipolarity sets in. in earnest, everyone can relax and a more anarchist mindset can prevail…
“the multipolar world was something that was inevitably going to happen”
The multipolar world does not mean that somebody wins and somebody loses. It can be made to be beneficial to all countries. Some authority in the United States indicated that a multipolar world is fine (it was the meaning of what was said by a second tier type authority), and I think also the German Chancellor said the same basic thing recently. Putin said that Russia will remain open to foreign investments, including from the West. The best thing for the West is to also embrace the multipolar world openly; many multipolars would not like that, but that’s where the best of them will meet, where Putin and the Chinese are already standing. In other words, the West is not playing the multipolar card well. Those two isolated voices I read from are not enough. Putin says a change of elites is coming to the West. If they’re too bad, then of course a general replacement is the obvious need. The lack of adjustment on the multipolar change, especially in rhetoric which is what is most needed, shows again that they “can’t”; people change too – but when? It’s very late already on the multipolar front. “A bigger multipolar world is better than a smaller multipolar world.”
In theory, you are correct. But the reality has little to do with a multipolar world or a unipolar world. A small number of Billionaires and their hanger-on want to remake the world to suit their sensibilities. “People” don’t fit into that image. Climate change is the new Nazism. It just happens to be theses that Russia and China are not in the firm grip of this new Nazism.
“The multipolar world does not mean that somebody wins and somebody loses”?
***
I beg to differ.
A multipolar world means that the Empire, that current unipolar world hegemonic power, the avowed exclusive proponent of “full spectrum dominance”, that so-called exceptional and indispensable entity… LOSES big, in fact loses ALL.
In the forthcoming multipolar world said Empire basically becomes one nation only among all others. In a nutshell, multipolarity means the decline and ultimately the end of imperial totalitarianism. THAT is about to transform yesterday’s world into an unrecognizable one, making it ultimately one world of ALL, by ALL, for ALL… at long last.
That will remain forever the defining moment of the XXI st century.
The ones favoring “that current unipolar world…” fail like you say, but not the rest of the country, that can benefit too.
“The multipolar world does not mean that somebody wins and somebody loses. ”
It is a loss to those who believe in American exceptionalism and in America’s right to control the World. They’ll fight to the last human on this planet to defend this.
Well loss of dollar hegemeony WILL lead to a MAJOR loss of living standards–purchased with artificial credit–for the US and West.
A price worth paying for the multipolaristas but many Americans will disagree.
If we summarize the story of Western Modernity we get the following :
1. A propitious context in the land of the Franks in the 12th century (ingredients) has set in motion a chain reaction of causes and effects that led to the emergence of Western Modernity and capitalism
2. Following the crusades a reagent, in the form of long distance commerce between the land of the Franks and Palestine, has set in motion a process leading to the emergence of the paradigm of Modernity which is “the reason that is at work in the transformation of money into capital”
3. The financial success of long distance merchants attracted copy-cats and unleashed envy and desire of material possessions
4. Mass looting of the rest of the world during “the great discoveries” allowed some Western European societies to accumulate the capital that paid for their industrial revolution
5. The attraction of all to the paradigm of Modernity expanded its domain to everything under the sun which gave rise to philosophic rationalism and the scientific method. Both originated in “the reason that is at work in the transformation of money into capital” and both are now instrumental to the success of the enterprises that finance the operation of their research facilities.
6. The philosophers of the Enlightenment separated life in distinct silos that detached the minds from the wholeness and centrality of life which motivated enterprises to externalize, as much of their operating costs as they could, onto the habitat and the health of their workers.
7. The Western rationalist worldview is rooted in individualism and materialism and this irrevocably separates the West from the rest of the world.
8. The paradigm of Western Modernity and the Western rationalist worldview gives us “the paradox of Modernity” :
8.1. An incomparable success at producing cheap commodities greatly facilitated the reproduction of individual life and unleashed an exponential population growth
8.2. A finite environment does unfortunately not have the capacity to supply the energetic and material resources to satisfy the demand of an exponentially growing population
8.3. Cheap productions have been made possible by a massive externalization of costs which resulted in the accumulation of side-effects while an ever growing demand of resources has led to the rarefaction of those resources… which, in turn, has led to conflicts between human societies for the control of what remains available and this explains one of the core sources of the present Geo-political conflicts
9. As of today humanity has accumulated a range of factors that has become non manageable :
9.1. The West and the non-Western world have incompatible societal cultural fields which results in incomprehension and conflicts. See “The Continuum of the Cultural Field”.
9.2. Western Modernity has inflicted side-effects like resource rarity and damages to the earth’s equilibrium that supports life (resource rarity, the poisoning of air water and land, abrupt climate change, the spread of plagues, and so on and on… )
9.3. The governance-world got destabilized by the natural shift of the center of gravity of the economy-world to East-Asia with Beijing at the core and the Western refusal, to let a country with 4 times the population of the US to surpass it economically, indicates a vision of self that is out of bound with a healthy vision of the world. But the fact is that cultural exceptionalism never trumps population levels nor physical realities…
9.4. All these factors are now impacting one another causing feed-back loops that conclude with tipping-points shifting the present equilibrium of our earth in unforeseeable directions… I call this “the great convergence of Late-Modernity” which causes “the predicament of humanity” that future generations will have to live with…
_________
This is the general context in which 87% of the non-Western world is refusing to integrate the Western cultural field. The world was forced to submit to the hegemony of the USA, and its resulting unequal relations and economic exploitation, because of its sheer dominance in the economic and military fields in the wake of World War 2. But now, that China’s economic ascendancy is force-shrinking the relative economic might of the West, the rest of the world senses that the time has come to resist Western hegemony and so it is refusing to integrate the Western cultural field.
The Russian military operation in Ukraine constitutes the tipping point when the South representing some 87% of the non-Western world conclude the following :
1. All nations on earth have been silently witnessing the West’s provocative military expansion (NATO) to the borders of Russia over the last 3 decades
2. In light of this aggressive Western expansion all non-Western nations understand that Russia is being forced or to submit to Western diktats or to fight back…
3. The rest of the world also understands that this aggressive Western expansion is questioning the sovereign rights of those societies bordering Russia that are accepting to be instrumental in this military expansion. The sovereign right of those nations is infringing on Russia’s natural right to self-defense. And this contradiction, in turn, explains the sympathy of the non-Western world for Russia’s resistance to Western hegemony.
__________
When all this is taken into account it becomes understandable that most Non-Western nations, which represent some 87% of the world population, refuse to condemn Russia, refuse to sanction Russia, and by the same token their positions constitute a very public affirmation of their refusal to submit to Western diktats… which is a public confirmation that the Western hegemon appears naked indeed.
The notion of “the International Community”, that the West has been abusing for so long, is now boomeranging back in the face of the West and this visibly is enraging it and exposing “the continuity of the cultural field” of its societies for what it really is.
The axioms of the Western civilization, and the Western worldview, are indeed rooted in dualism which, along the entire history of Western relations with the rest of the world, has nurtured that vile Western racism against “the other” that has resulted in the destruction of many “other” civilizations, the collapse of so many “other” societies, and the killing of untold hundreds of millions of “other” people… and lets not forget the more recent bombing to the stone age of all those who dared resist Western hegemony.
A question is slowly rising that goes as follows : should the West not be called to answer for its crimes against humanity in a “world court of justice” after completion of the multi-lateral restructuring of the world order that is just beginning ?
Those who are attracted by this kind of long haul analytical history might want to go download the 2nd volume of my series “From Modernity to After-Modernity” that is titled Modernity.
So, how is it that “Russia” is not “Western” but Japan is?
In a first move Modernity started in South-Western Europe in the 12th century and from there it expanded to the whole of Western Europe. With “the Great Discoveries Western Europe expanded into colonial extensions. Some of these expansions got populated by Western Europeans fleeing religious oppression and by British prison population and also by poor souls who were shipped there to alleviate social problems to Western European countries starting in the18th century and along the 19th and the first part of the 20th century…
In a second move with the Meiji era Japan industrialized and after the second world war it came de facto under US control while South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore (the tigers) were heavily subsidized, and integrated in the Western economic sphere, for propaganda reasons in order to offer a flattering comparison with Communist China…
These 2 moves gave us the “countries of the North” and the rest of the world is considered to be forming “the South” (Russia, India, China, and the countries of the Tri-Continental-Area, the Eurasian area, South Asia, Africa, South America) .
The North is also called the “Golden Billion” and represents barely 13 % of the world population…
‘So, how is it that “Russia” is not “Western” but Japan is?’
Japan surrendered. That, and they’re nowhere as large or wealthy.
Japan’s big mistake was trying to conquer on it’s own, instead of divide & conquer, like UK.
Bah humbug to both of them.
Japan is an occupied Country -by USA since 1946 ! They have even imposed US Customs & products & USA News which is repeated by Jap Media. That’s why.
“3. The financial success of long distance merchants attracted copy-cats and unleashed envy and desire of material possessions”
So greed didn’t exit until the Crusades?
A question is slowly rising that goes as follows : should the West not be called to answer for its crimes against humanity in a “world court of justice” after completion of the multi-lateral restructuring of the world order that is just beginning ?
And the answer to your question is yes, hell yes.
The West in general and America in particular must be put on trial for their crimes.
We can start–but not end–with holding America accountable for its sociocidal war against Iraq.
Make no mistake, America, your Day of Judgement is coming.
The staggering death toll in Iraq
The American public must come to terms with the scale of the violence and chaos we have unleashed
https://www.salon.com/2018/03/19/the-staggering-death-toll-in-iraq_partner/
“….Currency baskets are being considered within the BRICS+ to escape the American monetary hegemony, which is a BIG thing!…”
Unfortunately, Kazakhstan has now cancelledthe negotiations on the CIS currency basket. There are still too many states that the West’s model is better.
“debacle” is most apt…the flood following the breaking of the ice…
No one should say the US is crumbling, no one.
US has never been crumbling. There is absolutely no proof of America is crumbling.
US/NATO has just been extended with Sweden and Finland. Our Allies in Japan, S. Korea, Australia, NZ, Canada and Poland are crazy to do whatever it takes to be back to back with the United States.
US has expanded its military Space Command Centre in Space.
Vietnam, Thailand, Kazakhstan, Cambodia, Saudi, Libya, Iraq and the Kurds all love and would like to go to America and be like Americans.
India has always loved English and all Indians have Europe in their hearts.
We are not crumbling!
Charting a course: gradually, then suddenly;
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said.
“Gradually, then suddenly.”
These lines from Ernest Hemingway’s novel “The Sun Also Rises”, reveal a lot about the human experience when it comes to success and failure.
There will be pain and shock when the US finds the world crumbling beneath beneath it’s feet. Only then will it realise that this outcome was quite predictable and inevitable.
I want some of the drugs you’re taking. Unfortunately, my rose colored glasses were broken a long time ago. America isn’t crumbling, it has crumbled. Half of our large cities look like they were bombed out slums. Homeless camps, shit and urine stained streets. And that’s just California. Meth and fentanyl are everywhere. Wake up, man.
From year 1 AD to 1500 AD India had the largest GDP (mostly 23-27% of global GDP). After that China. In 1820 around 33% of global production and service was made in China. So called western hegemony took less than 200 years. China passed US as biggest economy in 2014 (according GDP PPP). When comparing certain vital real economy sectors China is actually twice or three times bigger than any western nation. In steel and aluminium production China is 12 and 34 times bigger than USA.
“From year 1 AD to 1500 AD India had the largest GDP (mostly 23-27% of global GDP). ”
Please show your work.
You can work all you want and have all the GDP and steel in the world, but if you dont have financial instruments and usury, it wont get you anywhere.
Proof? US and our dollares…………………………………………………..LOL.
Spanish tv news. The screen shows a graphic, comparing the unemployment rate of various European countries.
“Spain has the highest unemployment rate among developed countries”
The arrogance is breathtaking. And they don’t even notice it themselves.