Opinion: Towards A New World Struggling To Be Born
500 years ago, the West set out to colonise the rest of the world to “civilise” it. 50 years ago the poet Aime` Cesaire from Martinique in his Discourse on Colonialism asked: “Has colonisation really placed civilisations in contact? Or if you prefer, of all the ways of establishing contact, was it the best? I answer no.”
The West continues to carry out a self-righteous crusade to “civilise” the rest of the world, casting itself as a choir of democratic angels among hordes of autocratic demons.
In his encylcical Fratelli Tutti (all brothers) Pope Francis denounces contemporary cultural colonisation and proposes that the best way for civilisations to come in contact with each other is through the model of the polyhedron, a solid figure with different plane faces all equal in importance.
In January 2015 he explained: “When conditions are imposed by colonising empires, they seek to make these peoples lose their own identity and create uniformity. This is spherical globalisation — all points are equidistant from the centre. And true globalisation — I like to say this — is not a sphere. It is important to globalise, but not like the sphere but rather, like the polyhedron. Namely that each people, every part, preserves its identity without being ideologically colonised.”
The domination of the West is being challenged seriously. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation is part of this challenge. The process of de-colonisation is continuing and “global” institutions mostly set up by the US and UK elites to serve their interests are being called into question. Alternative trade and financial institutions are being set up by the global majority.
Responsibility to push for peace
Zhang Weiwei in ‘The China Wave’ says “The world is thus witnessing a wave of change from a vertical world order, in which the West is above the rest in both wealth and ideas, to a more horizontal order, in which the rest, notably China, will be on a par with the West in both wealth and ideas. This is an unprecedented shift of economic and political gravity in human history, which will change the world forever.”
When UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres addressed the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation last July in Astana: he hailed the SCO as “a valuable partner of the United Nations.” He said that “as the largest regional organisation in the world … it has the power and responsibility to push for peace”.
In a passionate appeal, he called on SCO to help restore faith in multilateralism: “This is the moment to reaffirm our common commitment to multilateralism, with the United Nations at its centre, bound by the principles set out in the UN Charter, international law and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We must avoid at all costs the risk of further fragmentation. We need one global economy, one global market, one global Internet and one global set of standards for AI and other relevant technologies.”
“The institutions and frameworks of global governance, from the Security Council to the Bretton Woods system, are out of date and out of time. They were created after the Second World War when the world was very different from what it is today, and when many of the countries that today exist were not yet independent from colonialism.”
Managing the morbid symptoms
As we try to make sense of the seismic changes caused by the transformation from a unipolar to a multipolar world we must expect what Antonio Gramsci told us nearly a hundred years ago as the historical conditions that gave rise to the Second World War were emerging around him: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; in this period in between two historical eras a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
These morbid symptoms include terrorism, confrontational politics, the devaluation of diplomacy and even, war. If we do not manage these morbid symptoms within a framework of peaceful coexistence, they will get out of control and we will end up destroying each other on this planet.
While the world burns, with the climate emergency worsening, geopolitical polarisation widening, hate and demonisation of adversaries, digitilisation that enslaves and dehumanises, rising inequality, walls to stop people who have to moved to find a better life, wars and genocides unleashed with impunity, the Sustainable Development Goals more elusive than ever, the spread of distrust and hopelessness … multilateral organisations like the SCO have the obligation to be part of the solutions and not of the problems.
In its efforts to reform the global governance system resisting global hegemony, unilateralism, and protectionism, the SCO must seek to practice the core principles of the United Nations, international fairness and multilateralism while promoting a more open, inclusive, and balanced approach to economic globalisation.
The new must not mimic the old
It must not end up imitating the institutions and mindsets of the unipolar world. A new challenge for states that need to join multilateral organisations is not to let this shared sovereignty become neocolonial where national decision-making loses all substance.
In George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’, the animals seek to reform the governance system of the farm and overthrow the men who oppress them so cruelly. But instead of reforming the way the farm was run, they only replace the old rulers and become indistinguishable from them.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
Western critics of the SCO castigate it for being ineffective and irrelevant and just a talking shop. They say that unless it becomes like NATO and the European Union it will achieve very little.
The SCO did not set out to be like NATO and the European Union and it must do all it can to remain true to itself and become neither a military alliance against others nor a union that becomes top-down, usurping the sovereignty of its members, homogenising them and creating a one-size-fits-all bloc that largely ignores the specific realities of its diverse members, especially of the smaller ones.
Building a house from the roof down
Apart from expanding eastwards and provoking the horrible war in Ukraine, in the last 34 years, NATO has carried out eight
military interventions where in cases like the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Libya, the people of these countries, regions and the international community have still to pick up the pieces. Trying to export state building and imposing it from the outside is like building a house from the roof down. It will collapse and hurt many people.
Instead of learning from these failed and painful military operations, NATO is busy developing a kind of global Monroe’s doctrine where all the world is its backyard and everyone must submit to its hegemony.
The SCO must lead by example, working to resolve conflicts peacefully between its members. While working to find common ground and seeking cooperation through creating a common framework to address common concerns and challenges, it must not micromanage implementation by its members and partners. While having a structure that coordinates the common action that needs to be taken, it must not build a heavy bureaucracy at its centre that takes on a life of its own and starts running the affairs and imposing itself on its members.
Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani rightly says that the future that has already started will be multi-civilisational, multipolar and multilateral. All these are core principles of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. Time is on the side of the countries that make up the SCO and other organisations representing 84% of the global population.
So while ensuring that they stay the course to reform global governance to make it work in the interest of the all the world population and not just the 16% of the collective West, they must exercise strategic patience, not due to weakness but because they are wise enough not to be provoked into reacting blindly and angrily to the efforts by those who want to continue dominating the world and refuse to learn to live with others instead of over others.
The elephants and the grass
The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation must continue reaching out to as many countries as possible in the world to work with them on the urgent work needed to avoid nuclear annihilation, stop the global economy becoming increasingly a war economy and divert the billions of dollars towards sustainable development and to have “one global economy, one global market, one global Internet and one global set of standards for AI and other relevant technologies.”
The SCO and similar multilateral organisations must do all they can to create for – and with – small and medium states the essential room for manoeuvre to work for the common good of their people. Such nations must do all they can, however difficult, not to be caught as cogs in the wheels of those major powers who practise an “Us-Or-Themism” approach to other countries. As the African proverb says: “When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.” The weak get hurt in conflicts between the powerful.
Our countries, whatever the size, are made up of people, not pawns. We have the same hopes, aspirations and the right to live a decent life “free from fear and want” as those living in major powers. Lifting people out of poverty is a huge step forward in terms of human rights. But it is not enough to be fed and unfree as much it is not enough to be free and unfed … to live a decent life in dignity, people must be both fed and free.
In his masterpiece “Master and Margarita” Mikhail Bulgakov reminds us that we were and we should remain one world. At one point he writes: “I don’t have any special talents, just an ordinary desire to live like a human being.” We still live in a world where millions are being denied this basic desire: through the climate emergency, wars, oppression, poverty and inequality.
Instead of being forced to take sides, we need to engage with all countries to promote our own common interests.
A new world is painfully emerging. More nations are pursuing their own paths and seeking to control their own destiny, even by freely forming inclusive multilateral organizations in an increasingly multipolar world facing unprecedented global challenges.
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