The two defining moments of the historic 20th anniversary Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit in Dushanbe, Tajikistan had to come from the keynote speeches of – who else – the leaders of the Russia-China strategic partnership.
Francis Fukuyama recently wrote a fairly objective and balanced article about the end of American hegemony. Fukuyama in the early 90s was clearly in a hurry to declare the worldwide victory of liberalism and the end of history. He later corrected his position. In some personal conversations with him, I became convinced that he understands many world processes quite realistically and is able to admit mistakes in his forecasts – a rare feature among narcissistic political scientists who make mistakes every day and that only makes them even more arrogant.
On September 11th 1990, during the ongoing disintegration of the Soviet Union, then US President George Herbert Walker Bush announced the arrival of a “New World Order”. Much ink has been spilt and many-a-video has been made about this phrase by those whose tinfoil hat is fastened around their heads perhaps a little too tightly, and thus have largely misunderstood the implications of this phrase, wound up by hyperbolic conspiracy mongers and distracted by dystopian visions of Satanic orders and a global police state.
Leonid Savin. Ordo Pluriversalis: The End of Pax Americana and the Rise of Multipolarity. Translatedby Jafe Arnold. London: Black House Publishing, Ltd., 2020. ISBN: 978-1-912759-36-1. 470 pages. $28.00.
The emerging Multipolar World is a geopolitical revolution. It doesn’t only mark a paradigm shift from the short unipolar moment established by the United States after 1991, but also the end of Western hegemony. The ongoing process of multipolarity is in favor of the different civilizations and against the Liberalist project of Globalization. Whereas Globalization tries to unify the world under one political system, one ideology and one civilization, multipolarity proclaims the diversity of different political systems, different ideologies and different civilizations.
Envisioning a world beyond global coloniality entails unthinking thinking of today and indeed an epistemic revolution which enables a writing of a different future.
Whereas George Marshall explained the responsibility of American leadership in the context of the cold war, Fukuyama attempted to presume the unilateral role of American leadership in the post-cold war, especially in the absence any major adversary on the global scale. But within a decade, after Fukuyama’s open proclamation of America’s liberal ascendance, American leadership began suffering from the disorder of doublethink that originates from the contradiction between theory and practice in the promotion of liberal values.
© 2021
