The second issue of the 21st Century Institute's TREND publication focused on the rise of regional super and middle powers. The research came to the unsurprising conclusion that, in the context of the emergence of a multipolar world order - what we call a world order change in political and intellectual terms - the emergence of China, a potential regional superpower, India and a competing Russia, should be considered at least as important as the United States, which retains some form of power. They are followed by the regional middle powers that have been on the rise over the last five to ten years.
Here we have the world's largest landmass (Russia), the engine of the global economy (China) and the most populous country on earth (India), then five Muslim regional middle powers (Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia), and finally two dominant continental powers (Brazil and South Africa).
It is a logical development of the nature of the world order that they all tend to be counted as part of the global South, a term that is becoming less a geographical and more an economic-political one, suggesting that the global North has been reduced to a narrow area of the globe, located on both sides of the Atlantic (EU, Canada and USA), plus its annexes (Australia, Japan, New Zealand). The shift in the balance of power is illustrated by the fact that the economic growth rate of the five BRICS countries has this year overtaken that of the G7.
By the mid-2010s, it had become clear that US global hegemony was facing two challenges, which were not unrelated. One is the threat from Eurasia, or more narrowly China, which is manifesting itself industrially and commercially, even diplomatically, and the other is the rise of the global South, which is increasingly linked to it in political and economic terms.
Several events in 2023 underline the acceleration of these processes. These include the historic Iran-Saudi peace deal brokered by Chinese diplomacy in the spring, or the fatigue felt as the Russian-Ukrainian war dragged on, exacerbated by the military and diplomatic dimension of the Israeli-Gaza conflict. And three major events this year are particularly topical: the enlargement of BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), and the Belt and Road Forum in Beijing.
The outlines of a new multipolar world order can be discerned from the signs pointing to multipolarity, a shift in the structure of globalisation from unipolar to bipolar arrangements, and the emergence of a Eurasian pole and a related but also self-divided global South.
The author is a political historian and director of the 21st Century Institute
The West's response to the challenge of a rising China is bloc formation, which is not in the interest of smaller countries. It would be advisable to change the sanctions regime and focus on mutually beneficial, win-win cooperation.
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