The new world order and the Global South

Abstract

The shift of power away from the West is often seen as a key element of the crisis of liberal international order. The reluctance by most non-Western powers to side with the West vis-à-vis Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has contributed to the notion that the emerging order will be shaped by a contested system of spheres of influence, geopolitical tensions, and a much smaller common denominator vis-à-vis the normative elements of global order. Yet views across the Global South vis-à-vis the liberal order are far more nuanced, and pointing to non-Western powers as a culprit for the crisis of global order would be simplistic. Indeed, many countries in the Global South tend to be less opposed to the values themselves that undergird liberal order but question the Western-centric ways in which the rules and norms are applied and the in-built hierarchies and inequalities of liberal order. The main challenge of existing structures of global governance thus does not seem to be non-Western countries’ rejection of the underlying rules, but the question of whether today’s system is capable of functioning in a genuinely multipolar order, where power and privilege are less concentrated than in the past. The recent ‘geopoliticization’ of the global economy and the emerging ‘tech war’ suggest this process of adaptation will be enormously difficult. At the same time, while specific subgroups are explicitly opposed to a rules-based order, there are few signs that the Global South—a concept of little analytical usefulness beyond denoting the non-West—would be interested or capable of articulating a genuinely novel or alternative approach sufficiently attractive to garner broad support.