Jörg Lau (a foreign affairs correspondent
for DIE ZEIT) has a much-admired article in Internationale
Politik[i],
which claims: “Like Russia's attack on Ukraine, the escalation in the Middle
East is part of a global geopolitical transformation for which there is not yet
a term.” Well, at the OECD Development Centre that transformation has been
documented under the term Shifting Wealth
in a periodic OECD publication called Perspectives
on Global Development.[ii]
A German translation of the term was established before, also in Internationale Politik [iii]
Weltneuvermessung. [iv]
To be sure, the Shifting Wealth narrative, with hindsight, was politically naïve. We
liked to ignore warnings that the BRICS group was more than about economic
convergence of the poorer Southern nations. But then, we were not alone.
Famously, Francis Fukuyama had proclaimed the End of History in 1989. The fall
of the Soviet Union and of the Berlin Wall suggested liberal democracy to be a
fundamentally better system, ethically, politically and economically, than any
of the alternatives[v]. Table
1 suggests that it turned out very differently.
Table
1: Political Freedom & Civil Liberties in Selected Emerging Countries,
2013-22
|
Country |
2013 |
2022 |
Trend |
|
Brazil* |
81 |
72 |
↘ |
|
China* |
17 |
09 |
↘ |
|
Egypt |
41 |
18 |
↓ |
|
India* |
76 |
66 |
↓ |
|
Indonesia |
65 |
58 |
↘ |
|
Nigeria |
46 |
43 |
→ |
|
Russia* |
27 |
16 |
↓ |
|
Turkey |
61 |
32 |
↓ |
|
South Africa* |
81 |
79 |
→ |
|
* = original BRICS |
|
|
|
|
Memo: USA |
93 |
83 |
↘ |
Source: https://freedomhouse.org/reports/freedom-world/freedom-world-research-methodology
The BRICS are a convenient label for authoritarian
regimes that turned rogue, notably China and Russia. It was held together by
the desire of their leaders to end US hegemony, to revise global governance and
to strictly respect noninterference in internal affairs. What could go wrong
with a “multipolar world”, which would replace a not so benevolent US hegemon?
Well, the recent massacers of Russia in
Ukraine and of Iran-sponsored Hamas in Israel have desillusioned brutally our
multipolar dreams. These massacers have been encouraged by an internal and
external weakening of the United States, as exemplified by the Trump trauma and
threat, by unresoved budget issues and by the US leaving Afghanistan, with
former support staff cynically exposed to the Taliban. The erosion of Western
dominance in the international economic and norm-setting sphere and the absence
of a “Western policeman” (Lau, op.cit.) has emboldened the most radical actors
to take greater risks across the world. USSR-Ukraine; Iran-Hamas-Israel;
China-Taiwan; Azerbaijan-Armenia; the list is getting longer, and it includes
the Sahel zone, too. Note in passing that conflict-induced migration seems to
weaken the Western polity, too, as it turns voters toward the Hard Right, as in
France, Germany or Italy. Many observers assume Putin´s mastermind behind mass
immigration.
[i] English version: “The
Israel-Hamas War and the New World Order”; German version: “Am Nullpunkt”,
November/December 2023.
[ii] The first, entitled Shifting Wealth,
was published in June 2010: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/development/perspectives-on-global-development-2010_9789264084728-en
[iii] Helmut Reisen, „Die
Neuvermessung der Welt“, Internationale
Politik, July 2008.
[iv] That term has given rise to a blog, now entertained by Thomas
Bonschab and Robert Kappel: https://weltneuvermessung.wordpress.com/
[v] Ben Zissimos (2022), “The
End of the End of History: A Political-Economy Perspective”, Intereconomics.
