"The Image of a Multipolar World. The Civilizational Factor and Russia's Place in the Emerging World Order"

Karl Sanchez·21 Feb 2023

What follows is an article written by Director of the Department of Foreign Policy Planning of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation Alexander Drobinin for the Russia in Global Affairs Magazine, on February 20, 2023 and republished at the MFA's website. Given what's transpiring in the Global Big Picture, the article is timely as the gathering together of likeminded nations continues to accelerate despite efforts by the Outlaw US Empire and its vassals to slow its progress. Tomorrow, Putin's scheduled to deliver what promises to be as important a speech as those form last year on February 21st and 24th. Today, he's consulting with his team and China's #1 diplomat Wang Yi who was at the Munich Security Conference and arrives after visiting Kiev. As important as what's happening in Ukraine, it remains a smaller part of the Big Picture and its larger struggle against the Outlaw Hegemony of the US Empire and its vassals. With that acknowledged, Drobinin's essay follows.

The ideological crisis in relations between Russia and the West, which moved into a hot phase with the beginning of a special military operation in February 2022, returned to the headlines of news and political science discussions the question of the future of the world order and the principles of international relations. Let's try to look at this topic through the prism of foreign policy planning. First, here are a few introductory quotes.

Reflecting on the prospects for the development of international relations, in October 2022, at a meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club, Russian President Vladimir Putin noted that a common future for all would require a dialogue between the West and "new centers of a multipolar world order"[1]. He specified that the basis of world civilization is "the traditional societies of the East, Latin America, Africa and Eurasia"[2]. Such a statement of the question provides a conceptual framework for the analysis of modern global processes.

What are we talking about? In fact, the head of state clearly outlined the civilizational aspect as a methodological basis for understanding, describing and constructing multipolarity. It should be added that the President has repeatedly addressed this approach, characterizing the current historical moment, the essence of which, according to him, is "the disappearance of the creative potential of the West itself and the desire to restrain, block the free development of other civilizations.”[3]

Russian political scientists are also paying attention to the main trend outlined by President of Russia Vladimir Putin. Let's listen, for example, to this opinion: "The global meaning of the struggle in Ukraine is the return to the non-West, and we propose to call it differently – the World Majority, which used to be suppressed and robbed, culturally humiliated – freedom, dignity and independence. And, of course, a fair share in the world's wealth."[4] Once again: the return to the non-Western world ("other civilizations" in the president's logic) of a fair share in world wealth. In addition to the far-reaching anti-neocolonial agenda embedded in this phrase, we see an analytical opposition along the Line of the West and the World Majority.

Strictly speaking, the civilizational approach is only one of the possible ways of describing the world. However, it seems that at the current turning point it is he who gives the most verified "entry point" for an adequate interpretation of the processes associated with the transformation of the world order. As external symptoms of a change in the structure of the world, for many years we pointed to the redistribution of economic and power potentials in favor of new centers, as well as to the strengthening of the positions of globally significant non-Western players. But what does this mean in terms of realpolitik? What is the geopolitical image of the new system? How will interstate cooperation be organized in the context of multipolarity? These questions need answers. And in our opinion, it is necessary to look for them primarily in the plane of studying large communities - macro-regions or civilizations that have distinctive socio-cultural, geo-economic and international-political characteristics.

Let us turn again to the speech of the head of state at Valdai: "The meaning of today's historical moment is precisely that all civilizations, states and their integration associations are opening up opportunities for their democratic, original path of development."

In other words, the crystallization of civilizations (let's call them civilizational platforms) with a unique structure for each of them, as well as the development of links between them, is what paves the way for the design of a fundamentally new system. It is replacing the previous paradigm, characterized by the domination of one civilization and its expansion under the slogans of globalization, Westernization, Americanization, universalization, liberalization and erasure of national borders. As President of Russia Vladimir Putin emphasized, "if liberal globalization is depersonalization, imposing the Western model on the whole world, then integration, on the contrary, is the disclosure of the potential of each civilization in the interests of the whole, for the sake of common gain."

So, the world is moving from globalization to the formation of many civilizational platforms (they can also be called centers of power or "poles") and then to interaction and integration between them. This is a long historical process, a whole era in which we are entering, whether we like it or not. New centers of world development are looking for an opportunity in multipolarity to preserve sovereignty and socio-cultural identity and to develop harmoniously – in accordance with their traditions and based on national interests and aspirations of peoples.

It is important that civilizational communities cannot and do not necessarily have to be equal in economic and military power, territory or population. They are united by the fact that they have the ability to influence global processes, to bring their view on solving problems to the world discussion.

By what other features do we define a civilizational community? Russian scientists, since the XIX century, give meaningfully close descriptions. Each civilization "is built on the foundation of some spiritual prerequisite, some primary cultural symbol or sacred value, which later become the basis for the formation of an original culture"[5]. Civilization is "a special category of states with a long and continuous history, a pronounced identity and the willingness of their citizens and leaders to resolutely defend their cultural identity"[6]. Civilization is characterized by the presence of "socio-political practices fixed in culture, constantly reproduced over a long time, stable, although evolving civilizational matrices indicating the existence of a certain civilizational core"[7]. Civilization presupposes sovereign formation [8], and its identity "is based on the dominance of the worldview, translated into the energy of culture, and the practice of peace-building, which is expressed in a political project and reflected in historical goal-setting"[9]. Civilization is metaphorically defined as "a special humanity on a special earth"[10] or as the "special soul" of each nation [11], "a special, self-sufficient (in other words, self-sufficient) humanity on a special earth"[12].

Translating the above into the language of political practice, we list the criteria that, in our opinion, civilizations and other globally significant players meet.

This is, first of all, the ability and the presence of the will to implement a sovereign, independent domestic and foreign policy.

Secondly, the presence of sufficient integrated economic, military, demographic, scientific, educational and technological potential. Resource security, which allows to maintain socio-economic stability and maintain a high level of self-sufficiency of the national economy.

The most important component is the ability to act as an "assembly point" of adjacent geographical spaces, to play a leading role in integration projects.

Finally, an integral part of civilizational identity is the presence of one's own philosophy of development, one's own, "author's", vision of international politics, an original and significant cultural and spiritual potential on a global scale.

It seems that the following civilizational states and civilizational communities meet these criteria to one degree or another: Russia, China, India, Southeast Asia (ASEAN community), the Arab world and the Muslim Ummah, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as Western civilization with its Anglo-Saxon and European-continental components. It is these players of the highest level who are preparing to take the most serious part in determining the image of a multipolar world: the world majority – through the conjugation of opportunities and creation, the West (in its current state of adolescent nihilism in relation to objective historical processes) – through the opposition of itself to the rest of the world.

The structure of civilizations/civilizational communities may vary. And they themselves are in varying degrees of assembly, demonstrating the variety of architectural solutions[13]. Nevertheless, each civilization is characterized by the presence of a core (a civilizational country or several regional leading states). Around it, the second and third peripheral belts are formed. "Wealthy singles" stand apart – states with serious, above-average, ambitions – within the framework of the regional, and in some cases global agenda – and the tools for their implementation; however, these loners do not have sufficient aggregate resources to form a civilizational community, although they sometimes claim to do so (Iran, Turkey, Israel and a number of others, including, perhaps, Japan).

To guarantee the freedom and well-being of all states of the multipolar world, regardless of belonging to a particular civilizational group, is called upon to observe the principle of sovereign equality enshrined in the UN Charter. It should be noted that this basic principle is not only about the equality of interstate relations. It also presupposes a genuine sovereignization of independent countries, their orientation to national interests in domestic and foreign policy. Thus, advocating compliance with this principle, we defend the most important constant in the democratization of international relations, the protection of cultural and civilizational diversity and the construction of a multipolar world system in which no State should be infringed upon.

The very logic of the historical process contributes to the formation of civilizational communities or platforms as pillars of the new architecture of international relations. Before our eyes, the Western world is losing the five-hundred-year dominance that began in 1492 (the reconquista in the Iberian Peninsula and the beginning of the colonization of America). A leading Russian international affairs expert points out that the power of the West "began to crumble in the 1960s"[14] under the influence of decolonization processes. At the end of world war II, 750 million people (a third of the world's population) lived in the colonies. After 1945, 80 former colonies gained independence.[15]

However, the decolonization of the 1960s did not lead to the acquisition of full economic and political sovereignty by the newly independent states. The system of international settlements and accumulation of gold and foreign exchange reserves centered under the US dollar, the Bretton Woods institutions, the cross-border movement of capital of Western TNCs and much more represented a new, more sophisticated and normatively (but not morally) protected form of colonial domination. Neocolonialism was designed to ensure the non-stop transfer of the resources of the developing world to the needs of the "golden billion". After the collapse of the USSR and the socialist community, this system spread to almost the entire world under the slogans of globalization. Neocolonial practices allowed the ruling groups of the West to keep their economies afloat, to ensure a high level of consumption of the population, and also to preserve on this basis the so-called liberal democratic structure of society, which, however, began to rapidly erode and return to the historically inherent Antisocial norm of the West – the very Hobbesian war against all – as the economic crisis grew.

At the beginning of the XXI century, the rise of the Global East and the South, accelerated due to the development of cross-border cooperation, broke this economically and morally untenable paradigm. In 2021, the BRICS countries surpassed the share of the "seven" in the global volume of economic activity, forming 32% of world GDP at purchasing power parity[16]. Economic development is followed by political subjectivity, the very sovereignization of nation-states mentioned above. In each of the world macro-regions, a globally significant leading state or several such countries have emerged.

Until recently, this process was natural, disordered, even spontaneous. The long trend was clearly visible, but it took time to structure it.

There is reason to believe that the impetus for a qualitative transformation of the situation was given by a special military operation of Russia. This is evidenced by the unwillingness of the World Majority to join the anti-Russian sanctions and political and propaganda campaign of the West. The results of the november 2022 vote on the draft odious resolution of the UN General Assembly on "compensation for damage to Ukraine" are indicative[17]. More than half of the UN member states refused to support the confrontational text. Symptomatic observation by the authors of one of the analytical reviews published in Asia: "Leaders of the Global South are struck by the contrast between the West's insistence on Ukraine and the lack of similar zeal when it comes to problems in other parts of the world."[18] Westerners also clearly overdid it with arm twisting. Indian Foreign Minister Subramaniam Jaishankar recommended that Europe "grow out of a mindset that assumes that its problems are those of the rest of the world."[19]

Of course, the root causes of the world majority's unwillingness to become part of the anti-Russian coalition are not directly related to Ukraine. Russian experts note that "the inhabitants of the former Third World consider it right and historically irreversible to oppose the former colonial rulers."[20] Russia's actions are viewed through the prism of restoring historical justice. There is a real "opportunity to build effective schemes of interaction and development not against the West, but bypassing it, without its participation"[21]. And this is not "non-resistance to evil by violence" according to Leo Tolstoy or M. Gandhi, but an elementary disregard for the West (the embodiment of evil). It turns out that it is possible to develop successfully outside the "leader-follower" paradigm imposed by the former metropolises.

The realization that the rules of the game are changing, in principle, could in itself be an incentive for everyone to negotiate. But so far we see how the Anglo-Saxons, or rather their ruling elites, relied on the forceful restoration of the "unipolar moment" of the early 1990s. To do this, they achieve the dismemberment of civilizational communities into segments convenient for absorption according to the formula "divide and rule". This is not surprising. Back in 2019, while working in the private sector, the current US National Security Advisor J. Sullivan frankly wrote in a magazine article that the condition for the victory of the concept of American exceptionalism can only be "the defeat of the paradigm that highlights ethnic and cultural identity"[22]. In other words, at the level of ideology, the readiness to fight the "poles" that do not depend on the West has always been, it's just that now is the time for action.

To cover up its hegemonic aspirations, the West has put forward the concept of a "rules-based order." As Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov noted, it presupposes "a racist division of the world into a group of 'exceptional' people with indulgence for any action, and other countries obliged to follow in the wake of the 'golden billion' and serve its interests."[23] Some Western experts recognize that "order" contradicts the aspirations of the developing world[24] and the world majority will not rush to line up in its support. And we are sure that "order" will soon go to the dustbin of history or (in the best case for its inspirers) will determine the parameters of only the Western world within its natural geographical boundaries.

The civilizational factor in international affairs is a sign of the times. At the moment of the change of historical milestones, the struggle of ideas and ideas about the future intensifies. But this conflict does not occur in abstraction or in a vacuum. Its framework is set by the geopolitical and civilizational appearance of the multipolar world that is being born today.

[1] Meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club // President of Russia. 27.10.2022. URL: http://kremlin.ru/events/president/news/69695 (date of access: 15.02.2023).

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Karaganov S.A. We observe the emergence of a new world at the time of its creation // Rossiyskaya Gazeta. Federal Issue No. 242 (8890). 26.10.2022.

[5] Danilevsky N.Y. Russia and Europe. M.: Kniga, 1991. 577 p. (p. 75).

[6] Naumkin V. V. Model of the Non-West: Is there a state-civilization? Policy. Political Studies. № 4. 2020. S. 78-93.

[7] Naumkin V.V., Kuznetsov V.A. Dejavu: medieval motives in modern Arab political life // Vestnik MGIMO-Universiteta. № 4. 2019. S. 38-53.

[8] Neklessa A. I. Tsivilizatsiya kak prospera: mutilized subjecty Postmoderna // Polis. Political Studies. № 5. 2021. S. 39-55.

[9] Neklessa A.I. Russkii mir: tsivilizatsiya many narodov // Svobodnaya mysl'. №. 6. 2011. S. 165-180.

[10] Tsymbursky V.L. Peoples between civilizations / Ostrov Rossiya. Geopolitical and chronopolitical works. M.: ROSSPEN, 2007. S. 212-239.

[11] Ilyin I.A. On the monarchy and the republic. New York: Sodruzhestvo, 1979. 330 s.

[12] Tsymbursky V.L. Zemlya za Velikiy Limitrof: ot «Rossiya-Evrazii» to «Rossiya v Evrazii» // Biznes i politika. № 5. 1995.

[13] Neklessa A.I. Russkii mir: tsivilizatsiya many narodov // Svobodnaya mysl'. №. 6. 2011. S. 165-180.

[14] Karaganov S.A. We observe the emergence of a new world at the time of its creation. Rossiyskaya Gazeta. Federal Issue No. 242 (8890). 26.10.2022.

[15] Global issues on the agenda. Decolonization // UN. URL: https://www.un.org/ru/global-issues/decolonization (date of access: 29.12.2022).

[16] The World Bank Databank // DataBank. URL: https://databank.worldbank.org/source/world-development-indicators (date of access: 29.12.2022).

[17] UNGA Resolution A/ES-11/L.6 // UN. URL: https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/LTD/N22/679/17/PDF/N2267917.pdf?OpenElement (date of access: 29.12.2022).

[18] Menon R. The “Rules-Based International Order” Has a Priorities problem, stressing War over Food Security and Climate // Informed Comment. 14.11.2022. URL: https://www.juancole.com/2022/11/international-priorities-stressing.html (date of access: 29.12.2022).

[19] 'Europe Has to Grow Out of Mindset That Its Problems Are World's Problems': Jaishankar // The Wire. 3.06.2022. URL: https://thewire.in/government/europe-has-to-grow-out-of-mindset-that-its-problems-are-worlds-problems-jaishankar (date of access: 29.12.2022).

[20] Lukyanov F.A. Justice is not a universal concept // Russia in global politics. 2.11.2022. URL: https://globalaffairs.ru/articles/spravedlivost-ne-universalna/ (date of access: 29.12.2022).

[21] Ibid.

[22] Sullivan J. What Donald Trump and Dick Cheney Got Wrong About America //Atlantic. January/February 2019. URL: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/01/yes-america-can-still-lead-the-world/576427/ (date of access: 15.02.2023).

[23] Video address of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation Sergey Lavrov to the participants of the V Global Forum of Young Diplomats // Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation. 27.08.2022. URL: https://mid.ru/ru/foreign_policy/news/1827539/ (date of access: 29.12.2022).

[24] Menon R. The “Rules-Based International Order” Has a Priorities problem, stressing War over Food Security and Climate // Informed Comment. 14.11.2022. URL: https://www.juancole.com/2022/11/international-priorities-stressing.html (date of access: 29.12.2022).

Translating the above into the language of political practice, we list the criteria that, in our opinion, civilizations and other globally significant players meet.

This is, first of all, the ability and the presence of the will to implement a sovereign, independent domestic and foreign policy.

The most important component is the ability to act as an "assembly point" of adjacent geographical spaces, to play a leading role in integration projects.

The structure of civilizations/civilizational communities may vary. And they themselves are in varying degrees of assembly, demonstrating the variety of architectural solutions [13]. Nevertheless, each civilization is characterized by the presence of a core (a civilizational country or several regional leading states). Around it, the second and third peripheral belts are formed. "Wealthy singles" stand apart – states with serious, above-average, ambitions – within the framework of the regional, and in some cases global agenda – and the tools for their implementation; however, these loners do not have sufficient aggregate resources to form a civilizational community, although they sometimes claim to do so (Iran, Turkey, Israel and a number of others, including, perhaps, Japan).

The very logic of the historical process contributes to the formation of civilizational communities or platforms as pillars of the new architecture of international relations. Before our eyes, the Western world is losing the five-hundred-year dominance that began in 1492 (the Reconquista in the Iberian Peninsula and the beginning of the colonization of America). A leading Russian international affairs expert points out that the power of the West "began to crumble in the 1960s"[14] under the influence of decolonization processes. At the end of World War II, 750 million people (a third of the world's population) lived in the colonies. After 1945, 80 former colonies gained independence.[15]

At the beginning of the XXI century, the rise of the Global East and the South, accelerated due to the development of cross-border cooperation, broke this economically and morally untenable paradigm. In 2021, the BRICS countries surpassed the share of the "seven" in the global volume of economic activity, forming 32% of world GDP at purchasing power parity [16]. Economic development is followed by political subjectivity, the very sovereignization of nation-states mentioned above. In each of the world macro-regions, a globally significant leading state or several such countries have emerged.

Until recently, this process was natural, disordered, even spontaneous. The long trend was clearly visible, but it took time to structure it.

There is reason to believe that the impetus for a qualitative transformation of the situation was given by a special military operation of Russia. This is evidenced by the unwillingness of the World Majority to join the anti-Russian sanctions and political and propaganda campaign of the West. The results of the November 2022 vote on the draft odious resolution of the UN General Assembly on "compensation for damage to Ukraine" are indicative [17]. More than half of the UN member states refused to support the confrontational text. Symptomatic observation by the authors of one of the analytical reviews published in Asia: "Leaders of the Global South are struck by the contrast between the West's insistence on Ukraine and the lack of similar zeal when it comes to problems in other parts of the world."[18] Westerners also clearly overdid it with arm twisting. Indian Foreign Minister Subramaniam Jaishankar recommended that Europe "grow out of a mindset that assumes that its problems are those of the rest of the world."[19]

To cover up its hegemonic aspirations, the West has put forward the concept of a "rules-based order." As Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov noted, it presupposes "a racist division of the world into a group of 'exceptional' people with indulgence for any action, and other countries obliged to follow in the wake of the 'golden billion' and serve its interests."[23] Some Western experts recognize that "order" contradicts the aspirations of the developing world [24] and the world majority will not rush to line up in its support. And we are sure that "order" will soon go to the dustbin of history or (in the best case for its inspirers) will determine the parameters of only the Western world within its natural geographical boundaries.