When U.S. Representative Michelle Taylor gave a speech, many of the participants turned their backs to the podium and expressed their appreciation for the United States' one-sided support for Israel and its disregard for the human rights of the Palestinian people.
Egypt, Kyrgyzstan and other countries that have fallen into the political trap of the West are gradually waking up and embarking on a more neutral path, while Kazakhstan, Russia and other countries are even more resolute in opposing the West to endanger their own countries through "color revolutions".
The "order" emphasized by the West is still to maintain the domination of Western countries over non-Western countries with a power structure, and in essence, it is to fix the so-called "center-periphery" system and the highly unequal distribution of interests.
The essence of "order" under such rules is to establish a domination-dependency relationship in the economy, and to guarantee this domination-dependency relationship by political-military-cultural means.
Developing countries find themselves often at a disadvantage under these "rules," under which cooperation with the West entails higher compliance costs. Acknowledging this fact, developing countries have become more wary of participating in Western-led multilateral mechanisms.
Developing countries have witnessed the West's use of financial hegemony to arbitrarily impose sanctions on other countries and "**" global public goods such as the US dollar and the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) after the Ukraine crisis, and have accelerated the process of expanding the "currency basket" and getting rid of the dollar settlement system.
Behind the rise of the concept of the "Global South" is the rapid economic rise of emerging market countries and developing countries, their political defense and promotion of multilateralism, and their ideological resistance to neoliberalism.
Text |Li Zheng is a male teacher.
People take part in a demonstration in solidarity with Palestine in Chicago, U.S. (photo taken on October 21, 2023) by Vincent Johnson.
In 2023, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict unexpectedly ensued, becoming another major event affecting the stability of the international community. In this crisis, Western countries, led by the United States, have not prevented the occurrence of humanitarian disasters, showing that they are gradually dissociating themselves from the mainstream of the current common values of mankind, and it is becoming more and more difficult to win the support and resonance of other countries. In this crisis, the position of the United States and other countries in solving the regional security dilemma is contrary to the international community, and the leadership in international politics has been declining at an accelerated pace.
From the Ukraine crisis to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the United States and the West have become increasingly unable to continue to maintain their hegemonic status – which has become a stark footnote to the international situation in 2023.
The United States and the West are facing increasing skepticism and opposition.
On October 18, 2023, the United Nations Human Rights Council convened a special session on Palestine and Israel. When U.S. Representative Michelle Taylor gave a speech, many of the participants turned their backs to the podium and expressed their appreciation for the U.S. disregard for the human rights of the Palestinian people on the Israeli-Palestinian issue.
On October 27, the 10th session of the United Nations General Assembly convened an emergency special session to vote on a draft resolution jointly sponsored by Jordan and other countries calling for an immediate truce between Palestine and Israel and the immediate provision of basic supplies to civilians in Gaza. Fourteen countries, including the United States and Israel, voted against it, and 120 countries, including China, voted in favor, and finally adopted the draft resolution by a two-thirds majority.
The isolation of the United States reflects the people's desire for the Palestinian-Israeli issue. In addition to the Palestinian-Israeli issue, the United States and the West are also encountering more and more doubts and opposition.
First, the political ideas of the United States and the West are facing increasing opposition.
For a long time, the United States and the West have always regarded themselves as defenders of freedom and democracy, taking into their own hands the right to define "compulsory protection of everyone's freedom", "protection of the rights of minorities", and "freedom only through equality", and even used this as an excuse to instigate "color revolutions" in some countries in Central and Eastern Europe, Central Asia, West Asia and North Africa.
However, the countries that have been forcibly exported with the political ideas of the United States and the West have not ushered in spring, but have become more difficult. For example, Georgia, which had a "color revolution" in 2003, has not achieved peace, stability and prosperity in the following 20 years, but has been politically turbulent and economically withered.
In recent years, Egypt, Kyrgyzstan and other countries are gradually waking up and embarking on a more neutral path, and Kazakhstan, Russia and other countries are even more resolute against the West using "color revolutions" to endanger their own countries.
Second, the West's international strategy has been increasingly questioned.
The West, represented by the United States, has long pursued an international strategy of extreme self-interest. For example, politically, the United States has long pursued a strategy of "offshore balancing", supporting Israel in the Middle East to balance regional countries and instigating religious conflicts between Sunni and Shiite countries in order to facilitate its own control of the Middle EastEconomically, the United States and the West abandon economic globalization if they do not cooperate, and when developing countries exert their efforts in R&D and manufacturing, and export products and services to the West by virtue of their own competitive advantages, the United States and other Western countries use scientific and technological suppression, tariffs, and anti-dumping investigations as means to safeguard their vested interests.
Nowadays, more and more developing countries are gradually recognizing the true intention of the West's global strategy to harm others and benefit themselves, and are choosing a path that is more beneficial to themselves. In March 2023, Iran and Saudi Arabia, who have been at odds for many years, reached a rapprochement under the mediation of China, and since then there has been a "wave of reconciliation" in the Middle East. On October 18, the 3rd Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation opened in Beijing, with representatives from 151 countries and 41 international organizations attending the conference, with a total of more than 10,000 registrations. By the end of June 2023, China had signed more than 200 Belt and Road cooperation documents with more than 150 countries and more than 30 international organizations on five continents.
Third, Western values are increasingly being resisted.
Since the 70s of the 20th century, the so-called "inclusive" and "pluralistic" values have become more and more polarized in the West, which has not only led to the polarization of "identity politics" within the West, given birth to right-wing populism, but also aroused doubts, disgust and resistance from many countries. For example, Disney overdid it in order to cater to the "black equality movement", and after adapting the original book, the protagonist of the movie "The Little Mermaid" was arranged to a black actress, which attracted criticism from audiences in many countries and performed poorly at the global box office.
The rules-based international order "bottomed out."
In 2023, the "rules-based international order" has become a hot word in the Western discourse.
In April, U.S. Affairs Assistant Jake Sullivan delivered a speech on the "New Washington Consensus." He proposed that the future goal of the United States is to "build a fairer and more lasting global economic order for the benefit of itself and people around the world."Addressing geopolitical challenges with "de-risking" and diversification.
In May, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated a similar view that the U.S. will modernize and make the rules-based international order more modern.
The emphasis on the "rules-based international order" is a forced adjustment in the context of the continuous decline of the hard power of the United States and Western countries, and the opposition within the Western society to the high cost of maintaining hegemony. Since 2010, the West's military and economic hegemony has weakened across the board, and its public debt has become high, making it increasingly difficult to bear the huge economic and social costs of military intervention. According to a poll in November 2023, more than 40% of the current American people believe that the United States is too deeply involved in the Ukraine crisis. Another poll in the same month showed that the percentage of Americans supporting Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had fallen below 50 percent, a drop of nearly 10 percentage points in just one month. In such an economic and social context, there is less "hegemony" in American political discourse, and "rules" and "order" are pushed to the forefront.
Nowadays, in international forums, the United States and scholars often confuse international law with the "rules-based international order", which makes this superficially mild term more confusing. However, there is a growing recognition that the "rules-based international order" is not fundamentally different from Western hegemony.
The "order" emphasized by the United States and the West is still to maintain the domination relationship between Western countries and non-Western countries with a hierarchical structure of power, and in essence, it is to fix the so-called "center-periphery" system and the highly unequal distribution of interests.
In this power structure, the United States and the West should rely on their technological hegemony to dominate the global industrial chain and ensure that Western multinational companies occupy the top of the industrial chain and obtain excess profits.
In this power structure, the West induces other countries to build financial systems according to the standards advocated by the West and promotes financial liberalization in order to facilitate the cyclical harvesting of wealth by the former.
In this power structure, the West relies on the military alliance system to implement military deterrence on the one hand, and on the other hand, disseminates Western values or suppresses different political ideas through a large number of conferences, non-organizations, and social platforms to ensure that non-Western countries are "tamed".
The essence of "order" under such rules is to establish a domination-dependency relationship in the economy, and to guarantee this domination-dependency relationship by political-military-cultural means.
The institutional arrangements that maintain this "order" used to be called unequal treaties are now called "more modern and more contemporary rules" by the West.
On the one hand, the West is constantly "amending the rules" by introducing domestic legislation, and deliberately keeps the "rules" vague to make them more conducive to their own interests.
On the other hand, the "rules" set by Western countries in various fields often impose discriminatory restrictions on other countries. Once the latter rejects these "rules", Western countries will immediately change their faces and adopt tough measures such as technological suppression, financial sanctions, embargoes, and property expropriation. In 2023, the United States will continue to wield the financial and professional stick at China, Russia, Iran and other countries, adding multiple entities and individuals in these countries to its so-called "entity list". American scholars believe that economic and technological sanctions have become "another form of war."
The various "rules" set by the West are obviously biased in favor of itself and lack fairness and inclusiveness. Developing countries find themselves often at a disadvantage under these "rules," under which cooperation with the West entails higher compliance costs.
Recognizing this fact, many developing countries have become more wary of participating in Western-led multilateral mechanisms. For example, the United States had hoped to conclude negotiations on the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF) in 2023, but some countries, including Vietnam and Indonesia, rejected U.S. demands to enforce labor rights standards through a dispute settlement system similar to that in the USMCA. Reuters reported that the failure of the United States and its "Indo-Pacific Economic Framework" partners to reach a substantive agreement on the most critical pillar of negotiations is a major setback for Biden of the United States.
Western hegemony aggravates the "four major deficits".
Although the United States claims that the "rules-based international order" is an important guarantee of global peace, and that the United States' future goal is to "establish a fairer and more durable global economic order for the benefit of itself and people around the world", from the perspective of the West's means of maintaining its hegemony, the Cold War mentality has returned, the great power game has intensified, and anti-globalization and populism have ...... on the riseThe global challenges facing humanity are increasing.
Developing countries realize that the United States and the West's means of maintaining their hegemony are gradually increasing the deficits in peace, development, security, and governance.
First, clinging to hegemony has exacerbated the peace deficit and security deficit.
In recent years, the return of the "law of the jungle" has accelerated, the thinking of great power games has sprung back into the traditional security field, regional conflicts and local wars represented by the Ukraine crisis and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict have continued, geopolitical risks have intensified, and people are increasingly worried about the outbreak of a "hot war" or even a nuclear war. However, in order to seize interests and increase strategic advantages, the West, led by the United States, has continued to carry out military assistance to Ukraine, Israel and other countries, sat back and watched the escalation of the conflict, and even promoted the expansion of NATO and the process of "NATO Asia-Pacificization", accelerating the global military bloc, which has deepened the security security risks in the world, and the peace deficit and security deficit have become more and more prominent.
Second, the rise of protectionism and anti-globalization has exacerbated the development deficit.
After the outbreak of the international financial crisis in 2008, the economic growth of developed countries was slow or even stagnant, and the global economic growth was insufficient. Factors such as the great power game, the pandemic and the Ukraine crisis have lowered global economic confidence. In this context, the imbalance in the distribution of income and the widening of income disparities in some Western countries have become more severe, and populism, protectionism, and anti-globalization have accelerated and intensified. This will not only fail to solve the problem of unbalanced domestic development, but will lead to the intensification of de-globalization and the serious global development deficit. The OECD's Global Economic Prospects report, updated on 29 November 2023, predicts that the global economy will continue to face the challenges of inflation and low growth in the coming year.
Third, the instrumentalization of governance platforms has increased the governance deficit.
On the one hand, the existing global governance systems such as the United Nations and the International Monetary Organization are flawed, while the willingness and ability of countries such as the United States and the West to govern are also declining. On the other hand, some countries in the United States and the West have "instrumentalized" and "institutionalized" governance organizations and platforms, disrupted the international order, and even "withdrawn from the group and broken the treaty" at every turn, causing a greater impact on the global governance system and multilateral mechanisms. According to statistics, in the four years since Trump took office, he has led the United States to withdraw from 13 international organizations, agreements and treaties, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and the INF Treaty, adding more destabilizing factors to the international economic and security order. In addition, in order to safeguard their own interests and strengthen hegemony, the United States and the West are also obsessed with the collectivization and centralization of the global governance system, which has accelerated the logic of global governance to focus on competition and status, and further exacerbated the governance deficit.
The means used by the United States and the West to maintain their hegemony have aggravated the "four major deficits" and are unable to bring real peace and development to the world. In recent years, the United States and the West have paid more attention to building closed, exclusive and confrontational cooperation mechanisms in the economic and security fields, such as the "Quadrilateral Security Dialogue" and the "Mineral Security Partnership", which have further aggravated the trust deficit between the West and non-West.
Today, the non-Western world has become increasingly disapproving of Western hegemony and the international order it dominates. David Monyae, director of the Center for African-Chinese Studies at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa, believes that for some emerging powers, the international order has not been supplemented and improved after 1945, and is still dominated by the United States and other Western countries, which does not reflect the current global economic and demographic changes and the new situations that have emerged with them.
In practice, developing countries have witnessed the expansion of the "currency basket" and the process of moving away from the dollar settlement system after the Ukraine crisis when the West used its financial hegemony to arbitrarily impose sanctions on other countries and "**" the US dollar and global public goods such as the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT). Nikkei Asia, citing data from a British hedge**, pointed out that the dollar's share of global foreign exchange reserves fell 10 times faster in 2022 than the average rate over the past 20 years. At present, the share of the US dollar in global foreign exchange reserves has fallen from 70% in 2001 to about 58%.
The Global South – the new collective power.
Awakening and growing.
At present, the trend of "rising in the east and falling in the west" in the world pattern is accelerating.
In 2023, the "Global South" – another definition of non-Western countries – has become a new concept that continues to heat up in international politics. The "Global South" has not only appeared in Western-led multilateral events such as the G7 Summit and the Munich Security Conference, but has also been hotly discussed in the international arena in which developing countries play a leading role, such as the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation and the BRICS Summit. This new concept represents the awakening of a new group force in international politics that is seeking its rightful place and forming its basic position on participation in global governance.
Behind the rise of the concept of the "Global South" is the rapid economic rise of emerging market countries and developing countries, their political defense and promotion of multilateralism, and their ideological resistance to neoliberalism.
Ahead of the 15th BRICS Summit in August 2023, South Africa** reported that more than 20 countries are interested in joining the BRICS mechanism. Reuters estimates that more than 40 countries are eager to join the BRICS mechanism. David Monyae argues that developing countries that want to join the BRICS mechanism are eager to increase their autonomy and voice in how to manage their economies and respond to global issues such as climate change, and they seek to gain greater influence and advocate for a more equitable international order.
On August 24, 2023 local time, the 15th BRICS Summit announced that Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Argentina, Iran, and Ethiopia would be invited to officially become members of the BRICS family. According to the International Monetary Organization, the expanded BRICS economies will account for 37 percent of the world's total in purchasing power parity terms3%, more than the G7's 299%。The future economic growth rate of the BRICS countries will be relatively higher, and the gap will further widen. On the other hand, in the West, the United States, as the leader, is facing challenges such as soaring budget deficits, inflation, and shutdowns, and economic risks have increased significantlyReuters reported that the UK's GDP grew by about 0% in the third quarter of 2023 and is facing a long-term economic stagnation.
With the changes in the world economic pattern, the political pattern is also deeply adjusted. The "Global South" has further promoted the political proposition of developing countries, and clarified the global vision of developing countries after the collective rise: to pursue a more just international political order, to oppose discriminatory practices and double standards, to oppose ideological lines, and to call for more equitable and reasonable solutions.
On the issue of the Ukrainian crisis, more and more countries of the "Global South" have expressed political views that differ from those of the West, categorically rejecting sanctions against Russia.
In the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the "Global South" has also called for humanitarian concerns to be the basis for all action and to oppose unbridled military action.
These differences show that the values and worldviews of the "Global South" are different from those of Western countries, and also indicate that the "Global South" will take the promotion of reconciliation between countries, the common well-being of mankind, and the promotion of universal global development and prosperity as its long-term goals.
Li Zheng: Assistant Director of the Institute of American Studies, China Institute of Contemporary International RelationsShi Guannan is an assistant researcher at the Institute of American Studies, China Institute of Contemporary International Relations
Outlook, No. 52, 2023).