The Global South: the 21st century’s great utopia

Genuine world orders are historical anomalies, but almost every analyst, it seems, yearns for one. Let us engage with the finest representatives. Alexander Stubb, the impressive president of Finland (elected 2024), who earned a PhD at the London School of Economics, has published a book on world order, The Triangle of Power (2026). One corner encompasses the ‘Global West’, including North America, the European Union and the United Kingdom, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, Israel, Australia and New Zealand, a grouping founded upon shared values and institutions, democracy and the rule of law. Against this dispersed corner, he juxtaposes ‘the Global East’, running across northern Eurasia and encompassing China, Russia, Iran, Belarus, and North Korea, also with shared values and institutions, but illiberal ones. Everything remaining falls into the ‘Global South’, a residual that stretches over myriad countries, from Argentina to Afghanistan, Brazil to South Africa, Ethiopia to East Timor, lacking shared institutions or values.

Readers might perceive in this triangular structure a version of the First, Second and Third Worlds of the Cold War. China and Russia sit in the Global East (Second World), while China claims also to be in the Global South (Third World), a familiar problem from the time when China competed with the USSR for primacy in the Second World on the basis of claiming to be in the Third. Are we back in the same place?  Or have we been stuck the whole time, mistaking commotion for motion? It can feel that way.

Not for President Stubb, who contends that the era of dominance by the Global West has definitively ended and that the Global South, as the swing vote, will determine whether his evolving triangular world sees conflictual fragmentation or cooperation, especially over challenges he prioritises (global health, climate change, peace). He equates fragmentation with coercive spheres of influence and transactionalism, and global cooperation with fairness and representativeness. He warns of power vacuums filled by predation. He knows that the Global South is not ‘a monolith’, yet stresses its majoritarian world population and the supposed importance of large states within it (India, Brazil, South Africa).

His mechanism for achieving a better future with the support of the Global South is a structurally remade United Nations. He calls for the UN to return to its core mission – peace mediation – and for structural reforms: an expansion of the Security Council with five new permanent seats for Africa, Asia and Latin America, abolition of Security Council vetoes, and temporary suspensions of voting rights for members (permanent or rotating) that violate the UN Charter, such as by initiating wars of aggression, as Russia did against its sovereign neighbour Ukraine.

It might be tempting to ridicule this wager on the Global South and the UN as the latest utopia, in the tradition of Thomas More. Not, mind you, the utopia of Communism’s radiant future, which disintegrated because of its statism and repression, and not the Pax Americana miraculously restored, which will not return in its all-encompassing form. Not even the ever-elusive third way, the triumph of the downtrodden and oppressed, cosmic justice on earth, with justice even for the earth itself. President Stubb’s version is the Global West’s rules-based order being preserved by coalition with the Global South. In truth, this indicates a paucity of workable options: one of the more intelligent and principled advocates of a new and better world, who conceives of himself as a (values-based) realist, not only invokes the phantom of a Global South but also relies upon the United Nations as a reformable institution.

The Finnish President does not offer a persuasive sense of how such radical UN reforms might be pushed through. (Article 109 does provide for a General Conference to review and amend the Charter, but that would require consent from all five permanent Security Council members: the US, UK, France, China and Russia.) Nor does he offer a diagnosis of why the original UN structure failed to deliver what its architects envisioned and therefore why a different vision today, if somehow implemented, would work as wished-for. Which begs the question: what, if anything, could preserve the Global West and a world of greater prosperity and peace? Let us wend our way toward a possible answer, which, as we shall see, might lie in the kind of country whose citizens elected Alexander Stubb as president.

From the ‘Third World’ to the ‘Global South’

The term ‘Third World’ emerged from the First, in a French-language newspaper article, ‘Three Worlds, One Planet’ (1952), by the demographer Alfred Sauvy, who lamented preparations for war and disregard for the world’s hungry on both sides of the Cold War. Sauvy evoked a 1789 pamphlet by the Abbé Sieyès, written upon the calling of France’s Estates General after a 175-year hiatus (because King Louis XVIII could not raise sufficient revenues to pay for the Bourbon’s century long on-and-off war with Britain for supremacy). In 1789, France had three estates, the clergy, the nobility, and the commoners, and, in reference to the latter, Sieyès had written, ‘What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been hitherto in the political order? Nothing. What does it ask? To become something.’ In his own pamphlet, Sauvy concluded ‘that the third world, ignored, exploited, despised like the Third Estate, it too wants to be something’. The term did not come into immediate and widespread usage, though.

By the time ‘Third World’ did circulate widely, in the 1970s, it had come to feel pejorative – a synonym for poverty, proxy wars, coups and banana republics (the latter an immortal coinage of the writer known as O. Henry in Cabbages and Kings). ‘Third World’ lingered mostly as a political platform for expressions of collective grievance over historical colonialism and contemporary injustices. It would mostly give way to ‘developing countries’, which suffered similar stigmas about ‘underdevelopment’. The expression ‘Global South’ attempts, once more, to return to the positive, agency-centric meaning intended by Sauvy.

Most accounts attribute the coinage of ‘Global South’ to the American New Left activist Carl Oglesby (1935-2011), a former president of America’s Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), who, in 1969, during the US war in Vietnam, decried the ‘North’s dominance over the global south’. Oglesby happened to be of working-class origins and evolved into a leftist populist who sought allies on the libertarian right, for which he was expelled from SDS (accused of being ‘trapped in our early, bourgeois stage’ and failing to advance to ‘a Marxist-Leninist’). Not much came of his coinage until 1980, when Robert McNamara, then president of the World Bank (who had overseen the napalming of villages as an architect of the Vietnam War), invited Willy Brandt to chair a commission on international development.

Brandt was a former West German chancellor (1969-74). Indeed, he was Germany’s first Social Democratic chancellor since 1930, and had won the Nobel Peace Prize (1971) for his Ostpolitik, a policy of outreach to the Soviet Bloc. Having sought to overcome the West-East divide, Brandt now aimed to displace it. (However, the Soviet Union as well as China declined to join his commission.) He and his fellow commission members issued North-South: a Program for Survival (MIT), which drew a ‘Brandt Line’ to demonstrate a wealth discrepancy between North and South – not in terms of the equator, but in terms of his human-drawn line. The report essentially argued for a massive transfer of resources from this north to this south, not as a matter of moral responsibility or reparations-guilt but mutual interest.

Brandt mobilised a ‘Global South’ to argue for a US-style, win-win economic order with transfers substituted for trade. His Report, calling for massive redistribution abroad and advocating for redistribution at home, constituted an attempted European social democratisation of world order.

History can be cruel, however. Not long after the Brandt report, some Social Democrats in Europe – most prominently in Sweden – began rolling back the welfare state at home. Sweden between 1870 and 1970 had had a smaller government and a relatively more open economy than the European standard – and its economy had grown faster than any other developed country except for Japan’s – but from around 1970 Sweden vastly expanded social welfare. By the 1990s, further tax increases had become recognisably impossible and service provision poor, undermining political support for the welfare state even before a devastating financial crisis then hit. (This is where the UK sits today.) Demographics, too, turned as baby boomers began to retire and not enough new workers joined the labour force to underwrite transfers.

Sweden’s Social Democrats, long seen internationally as the champions of the welfare state, supported benefit reductions and tax increases, first in agreement with the centre-right, then after returning to power. Crucially, the government instituted pension reform (which would later enable the birth of their venture capital industry), and even allowed privatisation in healthcare and school systems to foster competition. Sweden’s market turn and fiscal probity went farther than that in most other European countries, but it traced a larger pattern, not least in Eastern Europe following the fall of the Wall in 1989.

None of the Brandt Report’s recommendations were implemented. In fact, international development aid, before and after the report, generally failed to bring about development. Instead, markets – with trade, investment, technology transfer – created a global middle class unprecedented in size, and reduced poverty, unlike most poverty programmes. Thanks to America’s security, finance and trading architecture, countries didn’t need navies or great-power status to reap gains of global scale: They could import technology and export finished products as well as commodities, overcoming small domestic markets. As several former Third World countries joined the West (e.g., South Korea, Taiwan) or shot up to upper middle-income status (Botswana, Mauritius, Columbia, Peru, Costa Rica, Indonesia, China) or even high income (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait, Singapore, Botswana), some Third World advocates (particularly in Brazil) lamented a ‘graduation dilemma’ that undermined the basis for aid.

Too often, ‘capitalism’ signifies billionaires and ‘oligarchs’, rather than the opportunities that flow to hard work and entrepreneurialism, the livelihoods from small and medium businesses (which account for two thirds of employment in the US and in Europe), spurs to innovation and the gift of distributed decision-making and agency. That an era in which more than one billion people globally ascended into middle-class status can be portrayed negatively – derided as evil neoliberalism – testifies to the sorry state of public debate. Brandt’s line, meanwhile, is forgotten, even as the failed ‘Third World’ continues to be reincarnated as the Global South.

Pre-Western World ‘Systems’?

Undergirding the imaginary of today’s Global South are engaging stories of yesteryear. Who would not thrill at William Dalrymple’s The Golden Road, an exuberant rediscovery of the Indosphere that took shape within, and in turn shaped, a vast geographic space and chronological time? Buddhism, Sanskrit, other classical languages, astronomy, bronze sculptures, the decimal system, algebra, trigonometry, the algorithm, all this and more developed in and spread across Asia, and beyond, and not via military campaigns primarily but trade routes and cultural exchange, through teaching, learning, adaptation. The justly celebrated ancient Romans could not resist luxury goods from the lands of India, and who could blame them? Indian museums contain more Roman coins than any other place located beyond the lands that were once ruled by the Roman Republic and then Empire. In Dalrymple’s synthesis, India’s Golden Road outshone China’s Silk Road, a catchall coinage for land and water routes across Eurasia, which, in fact, involved little silk.

The ‘Silk Road’ has afforded China credit for the exploits of Inner Asian merchants and explorers, imams and Sufi masters, scholars and soothsayers. Still, take nothing away from the achievements of China, which as everyone knows brought forth paper and printing (woodblock as well as movable type), the compass, banknotes, gunpowder, silk production, tea. There were many ‘roads’, even as we marvel at Dalrymple’s achievement.

Beyond the spread of religions and cultural practices or luxury-goods trade involving coastal areas and oasis towns, however, should we take a further step and deem this some sort of world system? Was the Hanseatic League a ‘world system’? It was a remarkable, innovative, long-distance trading circuit, which endured in some form for five centuries, across Northern Europe, rather than Inner Eurasia. The longing for a time when the world was not Western-dominated, especially not US-dominated, has led some scholars to invent a past that aligns with their hopes for the future, but imputes to past times coherence and capacity beyond what the historical record can bear.

A ‘world order’ cannot materialise from intricate cosmologies or trade, no matter how enchanting we find the exchange across what we ourselves intellectually divided into distinct civilisations (only to rediscover that they shaped each other). Our modern-day categories – not just world order, but the state, globalisation – project awkwardly back onto communities and lives as actually lived. More than that, a past of mostly strict social hierarchies, often derived from birthright, as well as servitude, frequent invasion, war and conquest, alongside exchange, hardly seems a guide to a post-Western future, even if the West were somehow to vanish.

The Mongols, people interject, what about the Mongols! Janet Lippman Abu-Lughod presents the Mongols and their immediate descendants as part of a ‘world-system’. She traces a synergism of trade and urbanisation (eight city-centred regions) that spurred prosperity in Eurasia before the onset in the 16th century of the European-dominated ‘world system’ of Immanuel Wallerstein, whose Braudellian Marxism entails ‘cores’ and ‘peripheries’ and ‘modes of production’ (whatever that might be). Her ‘system’, however, turns out to be loosely integrated commercial circuits, linking the Champagne Fairs and industrial Flanders with Baghdad, the Persian Gulf, Cairo and the Red Sea, China and Southeast Asia. She portrays it as non-hierarchical. Further, she asserts that subsequent European dominance did not derive from innate superiority, whether cultural or even institutional, but from a collapse of Eurasia’s own dynamism.

In her treatment, if various contingencies had not occurred – the Black Death, separate Chinese demographic disasters, early Ming renunciation of maritime initiatives, and, well, Mongol depredations wrecking trade routes – Europe might never have risen to dominance. Those ‘contingencies’ were not accidents, of course. In any case, she conflates sophisticated merchant activities and some wealth accumulation with serial technological innovation and organisational prowess.

A deeper version of Mongol claims to world order comes from a treatment not of trade routes but of state sovereignty. Ayşe Zarakol takes readers through the ‘Chinggisid world order’, as she labels it, then the Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals and Ming, in a sweeping intra-Asian history, which, she argues, knew the concept of sovereignty well before Westphalia in 1648. Her analysis centres on the ‘Great Khan’ (khan of khans), which enabled a sovereignty based not on discrete territories, with recourse to cartography, but on lineage, with recourse to astrology and astronomy (a different sense of space). State sovereignty, in other words, did not spread West to East, because sovereign Asian polities emerged, and coexisted, at least from the 13th century. Her analysis culminates in a 16th-century pre-European ‘world order’ constructed by the aspirations (for the world, as contemporaries knew it) of the Ottomans, Safavids and Mughals.

Her notion of a Chinggisid sovereignty model holding for centuries, like the old notion of a Westphalian sovereignty model doing the same, might be said to partly overlook the legitimation derived from pre-Islamic Persian, Islamic or Chinese repertoires. Be that as it may, she finds superior levels of cultural pluralism and tolerance in her pre-Western Asian polities, perhaps presaging – despite hints of future foreboding – what a world without Western domination might return us to.

Abu-Lughod and Zarakol exude erudition, while Zarakol nicely spotlights political organisation. But what happens when we layer onto this picture histories of institutional limits on executive power, rule of law and the consent of the governed? Some years ago, I put forward a different view of the Mongol legacy in Eurasia and how it has been mobilised by today’s authoritarian regimes and their apologists. Regions there, long after the original Grand Mongol ulus had ended, evolved into entities that continued to exchange goods, people and ideas, forming a kind of Mongol Commonwealth, like ‘Byzantium after Byzantium’, but the decisive dimension, I argued, was and continues to be forms of governance, none of which were or are liberal, let alone democratic.

That history, moreover, was exceptionally violent. The Mongols oversaw restoration, not just annihilation, but estimates of deaths from the ‘Pax Mongolica’ – by executions, infanticide, burnings, irrigation destruction – approach 29 million, more than Stalin and topped only by Mao, in the same geographies. Such numbers can only be educated guesses. Still, Mongol political order was not ‘world order’, and even if we imagine it to have been, it is not one to embrace, whatever the searing memories of subsequent Western imperialism and the injustices in the US-led order after the Second World War. An equitable, fundamentally peaceful and mostly law-based pre-European order, to serve as an adaptable model for the future, is hard to find in the past.

Western Civilisation: Murder or Suicide?

Europe experienced a population boom in the 19th century, exploding from around 100 million to more than 400 million, notwithstanding waves of emigration to the Americas. By 1900, Europe’s roughly 500 states of 400 years earlier had amalgamated to around 20, whose share of global GDP peaked at around 46 per cent. At the same time, Europe’s population relative to the rest of the world, notwithstanding waves of emigration to the Americas, also peaked, at 25 per cent of the planet’s 1.6 billion people. In 1900, Belgium and the Philippines had the same size populations, while Africa had less than one third the population of Europe and China was only roughly equal. Peoples of direct European descent (counting Australia and North America with Europe) peaked at 36 per cent of the global population in 1900. Although Europe proper constituted a mere eight per cent of the earth’s land mass, European states and monarchs laid claim to 84 per cent of the world’s territory at that time.

Then, of course, Europe committed fratricide, twice. In the First World War, the US rescued Western Europe from defeat at the hands of Central Europe; in the Second, the US and the USSR combined to do so. Thereafter, decolonisation set in, a process the West Europeans resisted, in vain. The 30 years after 1945 would see the birth of almost half of the world’s present-day nation states. Europe had helped shift the balance of power against itself by aggression and overreach. True, post-WWII Europe did enjoy an economic revival and still accounted for one third of global GDP in the 1960s, and 30 per cent as of 1992. Nonetheless, Europe (including the UK) has fallen back to some 17 per cent (as of 2025). Europe’s power is a shadow of what it once was – because of how vast it once was.

As early as 1956, Geoffrey Barraclough (1908-84), the historian of the European Middle Ages, pointed toward the onset of a new epoch based on Europe’s eclipse in a paper delivered at Oxford. His book-length treatment, An Introduction to Contemporary History (1964), argued that, because European dominance had ended, as a result of decolonisation and the rise of the two superpowers flanking the continent, we must shift from continuity-inclined (or historicist) and Eurocentric thinking to a discontinuous and global perspective on the world and the past. He underscored the rupture via the supremacy of science, technological industrialism, global urbanisation, the advent of mass democracy and mass politics generally, and the appeal of Marxist-Leninist ideology for the Afro-Asian revolt against the West. He covered Nazism in a paragraph, omitted the Holocaust, and, in a chapter on Soviet ideology, had next to nothing to say about the Gulag, famines and economic failures. Decolonisation was all.

In some ways, we continue to live in Barraclough’s ‘contemporary’ epoch, with two superpowers (substitute China for the USSR) flanking a diminished Europe, former colonies demanding more voice, global urbanisation, science-tech centrality and, above all, pessimism over a supposed ineluctable faltering of liberal democratic political and economic models. Though many decades old, the book could resonate today among those keen to write the West’s epitaph: give up, get out of the way, your time is over.

What about the United States? The Rise of the West: a History of the Human Community by the University of Chicago’s William H. McNeill came out coincidentally around the same time (1963) as Barraclough’s work. Around that time, the United States had reached a pinnacle of power, and its government and people confidently saw themselves as heirs of a shared Western Civilisation. McNeill, though, strove to write a history of global humanity. For him, history entailed not discrete civilisations but diffusion of technologies and ideas among them. He further argued that Western dominance arose not from innate superiority but borrowings from India or China.

Part I of the book begins in Mesopotamia, while Part II covers Eurasia before 1500. Eventual Western dominance (Part III) flows from its adaptation and improvement of others’ technologies and knowledge, although absorption of the best from outside went hand in hand with internal competition in the West, what he deemed ‘an ever-renewing, dynamic quality’. Even that small concession to Western dynamism proved too much, however. The fact that many non-random factors led to Western ascendancy had to be murdered. In 1990, McNeill – among the greatest practitioners of Western Civilisation history – denounced his own book as ‘an expression of the postwar imperial mood in the United States’ that conveyed the impression of a ‘form of intellectual imperialism’. With such excoriating self-criticism, who needed post-colonial studies?

Killing off the post-empire Western order when it is not dead and there are no guarantees that anything at all, let alone something better, will replace it seems suicidal. And there is more. Also in 1990, McNeill wrote presciently that ‘if China’s enormous bulk should ever begin to attain efficient modernity, it is hard to doubt that the Far East would reassert a world primacy like that it enjoyed between 1000 and 1450, before Western Europe usurped that role’.  Interesting language aside, however, McNeill did not foresee how the United States, Europe and Japan would invite Communist-ruled China into their open international order and thereby facilitate China’s coercive reassertion of primacy, a monumental oversight that was not McNeill’s alone.

Non-Aligned Myths

Between the Colombo conference for Asian solidarity in 1954 and the Cairo conference for Afro-Asian solidarity in 1957, and following US-supported coups in Iran (1953) and Guatemala (1954), 29 officials of Asian and African countries, representing or claiming to represent more than half the world’s population, met 90 miles from the Indonesian capital of Jakarta in Bandung (18-24 April 1955). They aimed to foster ‘Economic Co-operation, Cultural Co-operation, Human Rights and Self-determination, Problems of Dependent Peoples, Other Problems, and Promotion of World Peace and Co-operation’. At that time, the United Nations included only 16 Asian and five African states, one of which, apartheid South Africa, was not invited to Bandung, while non-UN member Libya was. (A South African journalist observed that ‘the African voice was mainly Arab.’)

The organisers invited two Vietnams and one Pakistan (Bangladesh and the Communist victory in Vietnam were in the future), and excluded Taiwan in favour of Communist China (well before the UN did so). Stalin was dead but the USSR was not invited, for all its fulminations against ‘imperialism’.  The US did receive an invitation but Secretary of State John Foster Dulles refused to allow executive-branch officials to attend, although Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr, as well as the author Richard Wright, both African-Americans, turned up at Bandung.

All told, nearly 2,000 attendees, including 300 delegates and more than 650 foreign journalists, as well as staff, advisors and guests, jammed a newly reconstructed auditorium and walked the streets, many attired to express cultural traditions, surrounded by crowds and photographers.

Indonesia’s Sukarno, whose country had won recognition of its independence less than six years earlier, after a long struggle against the Dutch, opened the gathering with an address, ‘Let a New Africa and Asia Be Born’.  He noted that the date (18 April) was the anniversary of the beginning of the American Revolution, and quoted Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s ‘Midnight Ride of Paul Revere’ (which, using poetic license, depicted Revere in 1775 riding through the New England countryside, warning of the approach of British troops). Sukarno acknowledged ethnic and racial differences among attendees, but insisted, ‘We are united… by a common detestation of colonialism in whatever form it appears. We are united by a common detestation of racialism. And we are united by a common determination to preserve and stabilise peace in the world.’

Alongside Sukarno, Burma’s U Win, Egypt’s Gamal Abd el-Nasser, China’s Zhou Enlai (sent by Mao) and India’s Nehru socialised and jockeyed for leadership. (Zhou privately stated: ‘I have never met a more arrogant man than Mr Nehru.’) By the conference’s second day, Zhou had arranged private meetings with nearly every one of the other delegations. In his address, he played down China’s revolutionary impulses – in the middle of a Soviet-inspired and assisted CCP Five Year Plan – and endorsed national sovereignty, including for countries embracing capitalism. Colonial English was designated the common language, while French was permitted (if the speaker provided an English translator). The Chinese used their own language.

Absent from Bandung, the UK was prosecuting vicious counterinsurgencies on the Malaya Peninsula (1948-60) and in Kenya (1952-60) and looked on the gathering with high anxiety over likely anticolonial sentiments. France, also absent, had just been defeated in Indochina and was confronted by a war for independence in Algeria. Whitehall managed to keep the leaders of Singapore (David Marshall) and the Gold Coast (Kwame Nkrumah), both with dominion status, away, but condemnations of colonialism rang out all the same. Washington’s bogeyman, a revolt of the so-called ‘coloured’ races tipping into race war, mostly failed to materialise. True, Richard Wright would soon cast the conference as a matter of race and skin colour. But most of the delegates rejected racialism as a basis for solidarity.

In fact, racially infused remarks were more common in internal US State Department cables about the conference. The US pressed friendly leaders of Pakistan, Philippines, Iran, Iraq, Thailand and other countries to blunt an Afro-Asian anti-Western bloc, though that was never on the cards. Bandung’s agreed ‘Ten Principles’ communiqué mostly appealed to state sovereignty, mutual respect and peaceful coexistence – precisely what a postwar order should entail. ‘The Afro-Asian world had the immense satisfaction of seeing its first great council held in an atmosphere of dignity and sanity’, The Economist wrote (30 April 1955). ‘In this respect Bandung challenged comparison with any gathering yet held on the world scale, and bettered many such.’

Decolonisation as celebrated at Bandung made the West better. Still, Bandung’s achievement was also its failure: it was a conference, not a multilateral trading order combined with a security architecture, a development bank, a well-funded global health organisation, or even a membership club. Nehru opposed the establishment of any permanent organisation. Even if he had supported it, it would not have worked – interests clashed.

Bandung suffered as well from a democratic deficit: though hailed as the voice of the voiceless, far from all the ‘representatives’ at Bandung had been freely and fairly elected. Delegates from authoritarian regimes, including Communist China, affirmed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and wielded it to condemn colonialism. But when the Ceylon delegate, an avowed pacifist, denounced Soviet colonialism, Zhou rose and exited the hall. Nehru too became infuriated, rejecting any equivalence.

The Turkish and Libyan delegations, however, took to drafting a resolution condemning Communism as ‘the new colonialism’. The head of the Philippines delegation, General Carlos P. Romulo, argued that smaller states needed US security protection and shortly afterwards wrote that the conference birthed a ‘liberal, Asianist anti-Communism’ set against not just Western imperialism, but Soviet/Chinese Communist imperialism. Many leaders at Bandung sought not to assert independence from superpower blocs but to align with one or the other. Egypt’s Nasser used Bandung to switch allegiance, to the Soviet side, in a bid to lead his own pan-Arab bloc.

There was no second Bandung. True, in 1961, a Conference of Heads of State or Government of Non-Aligned Countries met in Belgrade. The prime movers were Yugoslavia and India, along with Ghana, Indonesia (US aligned) and Egypt (Soviet aligned). Myths arose that Ghana’s Nkrumah and Yugoslavia’s Josip Briz Tito, among others, had attended the earlier Bandung. In fact, the Non-Aligned Movement was not Bandung’s follow-up but its rival. No second Non-Aligned Conference convened until September 1979, in Soviet-supported Cuba – a few months before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. As for Yugoslavia, it broke up in civil war.

Subsequent NAM conferences took place in Islamist Tehran (2012), Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela (2016), Azerbaijan’s hereditary dictatorship (2019) and authoritarian Uganda (2024). Dictatorial Uzbekistan hopes to host the next gathering. Obviously, an effective non-aligned movement has never coalesced, because the interests of putative members do not coincide and many preferred some form of alignment with the United States for security, foreign direct investment and technology transfer. China sought a degree of primacy against both the Soviet Union and the US. Now China’s ambitions are grander still, as reflected in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (2001), Belt and Road Initiative (2013), Global Development Initiative (2021), Global Security Initiative (2022), Global Civilisation Initiative (2023), and Global Governance Initiative (2025). Great Powers aim to shape the world to their advantage.

Neither South nor Global

Of the world’s eight billion people, a mere 800 million live south of the equator. Australia can be found in the Global South but not India. Admittedly, ‘the West’ does not compute geographically either, since it encompasses Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Australia and other countries not part of the Western Hemisphere or the Atlantic community. But the West derives from common domestic institutions and values (liberty, private property, rule of law, human rights – in a word, freedom), and is further bound together, for all the hypocrisies, in an institutionalised global order and operating system.

Developing countries generally are seeking dignity, voice and sovereign equality, but large countries aspire to regional or even global leadership, creating tension in matters of who gets to speak on behalf of the imaginary grouping. While Westerners worry about accommodating the voice of big Global South countries, African countries do not want to have South Africa speak for them any more than South American ones want Brazil to do so. No country wants Russia to represent or speak for it. More discretely, developing countries tend to be wary of China, which many have viewed as an indispensable economic partner but also a security threat. Indeed, even the economic side has become threatening with Chinese policies deindustrialising developing countries. All the anti-Western, self-styled civilisational states of Eurasia that were once great land empires – in the case of China, a current empire – have ambitions coloured not just by deep strains of resentment but also aggrandisement. Countries that would like to see their voices enhanced cannot escape this dynamic.

If there is not much ‘southern’ about the Global South, there is not much global about it either – unless, that is, one adheres to China’s strategy. For India, especially, this has been a painful lesson: appealing to the ‘Global South’, India has failed to consolidate a leading role even within just South Asia, let alone globally. Except for the European Union, varied regional institutions – the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the Arab Gulf Cooperation Council, the African Union, the Organization of American States – barely manage affairs regionally, let alone globally. True, there is the United Nations general assembly, where a Group of 77 (or G77) emerged in 1964 (years before George Shultz formed the G7, originally G5, a gathering of finance ministers outside of the UN in response to the 1973 oil shock; or the G20, which came together following the 1990s Asian financial crisis). The G77 has grown to 134 members while retaining its original designation, and its members often vote together on general assembly resolutions. That said, the Security Council has the ultimate say on UN action, or inaction, and the five permanent members, who hold veto power, are divided between President Stubb’s Global West and Global East, with none in the Global South (except for China pretending to be so). The CCP relies on the continued existence of the UN in current form to exercise its veto (or hide behind Russia’s).

The existence of the G77, meanwhile, helps China cajole or compel countries’ symbolic support for its preferences, such as its false interpretation of UN General Assembly Resolution 2758, which transferred the UN China seat to the PRC in 1971, but, contrary to Beijing, did not resolve the matter of Taiwan’s sovereignty. China further manipulates the G77 to constrict UN spending on human rights (in the sense of civil liberties), while redefining the concept to its opposite (statism).

China is an extraordinary civilisation. At the same time, its corrupt and brutal dictatorship works indefatigably to bend global norms, institutions and sovereign states to its interests and to present itself as the inevitable alternative to supposedly failed Western liberalism, even as China’s regime stops well short of shouldering the responsibilities and costs of global leadership. To be sure, the United States is ceding ground almost everywhere, undercutting its remarkable alliances and vast soft power. That is the way the US is belatedly but inescapably, albeit shambolically, rebalancing its far-flung commitments in the world in the face of China’s challenge. That has confronted allies with the challenge of rebuilding capabilities, and some are.

But the United States is not in decline: it continues to account for a quarter of global GDP, the same proportion as in 1880, with the world’s most dynamic economy, strong if stressed institutions, and a robust self-organised society. Paradoxically, China’s regime continues to need the US-led open global system, if only to absorb its exports (and deindustrialise its competitors) and for tech leakage. At the same time, the CCP leadership is keen to incite the sapping of US power, while calling for ‘stabilisation’ of relations, which in practice means inhibiting or stopping US efforts to respond to China’s predatory behaviour and the built-in harms caused by its economic structure, while China ramps up economic pressure on Japan, the EU and other US allies. China markets its technology, tech standards and payment systems as a Global-South friendly alternative to the US, rather than as a lock-in of the CCP’s surveillance capabilities, data capture and leverage. Its regime relentlessly evokes the language of the Global South – ‘sovereignty’ and sovereign equality – while infringing other states’ sovereignty. Ultimately, the ‘Global South’ is not merely a political term of contrived solidarity manipulated by politicians and intellectuals (who assign themselves the prerogative to speak in its name), but also by the CCP to weaken the West and enhance its own power.

In the countries imagined to constitute a Global South, but also increasingly in Europe and the US, few exercises seem more popular than pronouncing the end of the US-led order. Something that is already happening or certain to do so generally doesn’t require so much repetition and urging. Any plausible and superior replacement, meanwhile, remains vague. One typical anti-Western screed unwittingly demonstrates the limits of that stance for the world of tomorrow in the form of a paean to the BRICS, which have failed to introduce an alternative economic and financial architecture or security order (two of its newer members are at war with each other).

Yes, US leadership is increasingly contested, including in the US, but during the post-Second World War period and that of globalisation, not only did trade and migration opportunities expand exponentially, but the former Third World became largely literate, increasingly skilled and able to export not just primary products but value-added products. Yes, a backlash set in (once again), but the assertion that the US causes the world’s problems by striving for hegemony neglects to acknowledge that very behaviour on the part of Russia, Iran, India, Pakistan, Turkey or China. Be that as it may, the US-led order has survived not because of hegemonic ambition – on the contrary, the US has been, and continues to be, roiled by discussion of diminishing its global responsibilities – but because of the absence of something that is better and viable.

A Renewed Global West with Middle-Power Activism

Aspirations persist. ‘The Global South has increased its significance within the world economy’, one scholar-advocate observes, without explaining how that miracle occurred but adding ‘there is no sign that states of the Global South are any less dissatisfied with their positions in global economic and political hierarchies’. The world has been and continues to be unjust and, what is more, unstable. What, if anything, might be the answer? There might be none. But the fable of the Global South, in practice, proves to be mostly an instrument in the hands of China, allowing Beijing to pretend to be something it is not and to corral others to do its bidding.

At the same time, non-alignment has not ever been very practicable in light of the needs for investment, technology transfer, educational exchange and security. In this context, if there is a solution to the unjust and unstable global order, it could turn out to be what I dub middle-power horizontalism. ‘Middle powers’, to be clear, include not only Japan or France, but India and Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Mexico, UAE and Singapore, and dozens of others – such as Alexander Stubb’s Finland and, yes, Sweden. Their cooperation will not be global, nor solely bilateral. If linked to successfully rebalanced US leadership – not a given – such cooperation could forge a path to GATT 2.0, recombining economics and security, and opening up in new ways a world of opportunity, at home and abroad.

Multipolarity is merely a metaphor. The effectiveness of existing regional associations – Mercosur in Latin America, the Southern African Development Community, ASEAN, the GCC, even the European Union – and especially their potential to coalesce into something stronger should not be exaggerated. That said, countries are increasingly prioritising their immediate neighbourhoods, which analysts often decry as global fragmentation but could just as easily be likened to valuable lattice work.

Some countries, moreover, are deepening cross-regional lattice work. India has formal economic agreements with several countries of the Gulf, security and economic cooperation with Israel, and a deepening relationship with Vietnam. Australia now has a defence treaty and economic partnership agreement with Japan as well as a defence pact and a free trade agreement with the EU. A group of NATO members have formed the Joint Expeditionary Force partnership consisting of the five Nordics, three Baltics, Netherlands and the UK. This is middle-power horizontalism.

None of these initiatives, or others afoot, will guarantee the survival of a global economic and security commons. The belief that our global ‘operating system’ could survive without committed and competent US leadership is comforting to some but belied by the examples of the South China Sea, the Red Sea and now the Strait of Hormuz – and, possibly, the Arctic Ocean, the Baltic Sea, the Strait of Malacca, the Luzon Strait, the La Pérouse Strait and the Taiwan Strait. And that’s just in the domain of freedom of navigation through international waters.

To be clear, middle-power horizontalism is not and will not become a new world order. Vigorous exercising of agency in the name of sovereignty might do much more. Right now, there are three fundamental questions of global trendlines, all decisive, and decisive in their interaction. First, will the United States successfully rebalance its commitments and position globally, and put its own house in order, attending to its domestic challenges? Second, will the European Union, which is unable to go forward to a full single market and federation/confederation and unable to go back, somehow get unstuck? Third, will Chinese Communist party rule survive its profound fear of, and alienation from, its own people, and the deadly conundrum that there is no political reform equilibrium for Communist systems?

The ‘Global South’ will not be decisive for any of these questions. At the same time, middle powers – whether by banding together to stand up to China, by figuring out how to move an immobilised European Union as a whole, or, more likely, regionally, or by working with America in a successful global rebalancing – could be decisive.

Still, it confers better traction than the ‘Global South’ (or the United Nations) for less powerful countries as they chart a path towards greater agency – or, in a word, sovereignty.

And so, take your pick:

One. The fantasy of a pre-modern ‘multipolar’ order for the future that was not exclusively, but was unquestionably, violent and authoritarian, especially in its legacies, and not even a world system in any case.

Two. The fantasy of a non-aligned movement that never successfully took shape and devolved into authoritarian capture, too.

Three. A grand utopia of the Global South, which failed as the Third World, and has been linked to impossible reforms of the United Nations in theory, but in practice serves mostly as a platform for self-appointed spokespeople to bash ‘capitalism’ and as an instrument of China’s ambitions (global power without global responsibility).

Four. The reinvention of a decolonised US-led Western order, an option that suffers from an imperial past, hypocrisy and blundering; that afforded transformative opportunity, however unevenly, to developing and developed countries; and that actually exists, has no obvious replacement, and can plausibly be strengthened through the agency of middle powers.