The writer is a former prime minister and foreign minister of Finland
Three days into the war in Ukraine I sent a text message to Sergei Lavrov, Russian foreign minister. I asked him to “please, please stop this madness. You are the only one who can stop him”. I received a response within a minute: “Whom? Zelenskyy? Biden?”.
I tried again. The answer was straight from Vladimir Putin’s playbook, blaming the west and following the official line, “denazification” and all. That was when I realised that the liberal world order was under serious attack.
There are moments in history when an old order dies, and a new one is yet to be born — 2022 was one of them.
There are many events that could plausibly be interpreted as marking the end of the post-cold War era: 9/11 and the war in Iraq; the financial crisis; or the Russian annexation of Crimea. But Russia’s full-scale attack on Ukraine in 2022 was something else. It seemed to force the rest of the world to take sides.
There is a general misconception in the west that the world is united in its support for Ukraine. It is not. One might take comfort in the fact that over 140 of the UN’s 193 members condemn Russia. But the 35 that abstained represent over half of the world’s population.
More significantly, only around 40 countries, mostly western, have placed sanctions on Russia. Only two from Asia have done so, and none from either Africa or Latin America. Russia might be isolated from the west, but not from the rest.
The new world order will be determined by a triangle of power oscillating between the global west, the global east and the global south. The global west — essentially the US, EU and their allies, roughly 50 countries — wants to preserve the existing liberal order.
At the other extreme, the global east — China, Russia, Iran and around 20 countries that support them — wants to ditch the liberal order and create new rules and institutions which are less about sharing sovereignty and more about traditional state power and transaction.
The global south — led by the likes of India, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Nigeria and Brazil — comprises 125 states, from across Asia, Africa and Latin America. For many of these countries the war in Ukraine is less about hegemony and more about food security, energy and inflation.
The global south does not necessarily want to take sides for the time being. Sitting on the fence is one way of achieving its goals and shaping the emerging order.
The global west is mistaken in framing the new order as a battle between democracies and autocracies. The situation is much more complex than that. For the global east it is about power and managed dependencies. For the global south it is about agency, representation and economic growth and development.
If the global west wants to maintain the remnants of a liberal world order, it will have to start conducting a more dignified foreign policy. This does not mean sacrificing values on the altar of interests. It means listening and engaging rather than preaching and moralising.
The global east has been better at the game of persuasion. Despite its expansionism, Russia does not have the burden of a colonial past, at least in Latin America and Africa. China has skilfully created dependencies in finance, infrastructure and raw materials since the end of the cold war, becoming in the process the biggest trading partner for 120 countries.
The world is once again facing a choice. Will it be able to end the war and find a new system of co-operation? Or will big power competition lead to further escalation or even conflict on a global scale?
Perhaps the choice is not binary. As always, at stake will be a mix of values, interests and power. My prediction is that we will see the creation of multiple regional orders and overlapping alliances. No single power will dominate. And while their values and political systems are different, they all need to solve problems, some of them unique, some shared.
This decade is likely to frame the world order for the rest of the century. As in 1919 with the botched creation of the League of Nations, 1945 and the establishment of the UN and 1989, when many of us believed the rest of the world would eventually accept the three pillars of a successful society (liberal democracy, the market economy and openness to globalisation), we can get it wrong, right or somewhere in between.
We must avoid the mistakes of 1919, learn from the balance of power established in 1945 and make the liberal order of 1989 universally appealing.
