It is now clear that after the end of the Cold War, the world entered a global transformation. Its meaning and significance have been understood in different ways. Western elites assumed that globalization would automatically expand their sphere of control and dominance by absorbing the "Soviet legacy," for which they did not even have to fight. Much was not understood and we, indulging in convergence illusions, thought that we would "integrate" into the West, which would undergo a radical positive transformation.
But something else happened, and Western political scientists are writing about it. A totalitarian mutation of the West is taking place, especially in the example of America under the current Democrat administration. This is how British philosopher John Gray views the situation in his latest book, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. He argues that Fyodor Dostoevsky's warnings to our nihilists in his "Besakh" have universal relevance, that is, they are relevant to the West as well.
As a result, we are facing a qualitatively new international situation, the key event of which is the geopolitical crisis in relations between the West and Russia. It has been brewing for a long time and entered the stage of aggravation after the West's refusal to guarantee Russia's security in connection with NATO's advancement to the East, including the post-Soviet space, in response to Russia's proposals of December 15, 2021. Moscow was forced to decide to launch a Special Military Operation to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine.
Russia acted unilaterally in response to unilateral actions by the West, indicating a systemic breakdown in the functioning of the postwar international legal order with the central role of the UN and its Security Council. The principle of unanimity of the permanent members of the UN Charter, represented by the nuclear powers, was conceived as a mechanism to encourage the world's leading states to agree among themselves on issues of peacekeeping and international security. Moreover, Western capitals have started talking about a kind of "rules-based order. In reality, it nullifies the established international legal order, represented by a set of universal instruments concluded collectively and therefore openly by the world community, which impose equal rights and obligations on States.
Thus, we can judge about the crisis of the entire post-war world order, which originally implied a plurality of centers of power, which is now commonly referred to as multipolarity. Albeit poorly, with limitations due to the bipolar ideological confrontation, this order functioned during the Cold War, preventing it from slipping into another "big war" in Europe and World War III. Now, unfortunately, there are no such guarantees, and, as many Western politicians and political scientists recognize, the "unthinkable before" is becoming possible.
The world has come to a dangerous line. The essence of what is happening is determined by the West's desire to preserve at all costs its global hegemony, which has become a way of existence for Western elites. This 500-year dominance of Western civilization, its system of values and model of development has outlived itself and turned into a brake on world development. Thus, for decades, the cumulative deficit of the current account of the balance of payments and the U.S. federal budget is about 10% of GDP, which is more than 2 trillion dollars at the moment. These colossal funds are used for America's consumption and at the same time are withdrawn from the global investment turnover, where they could have been spent on solving common problems of mankind and on the development needs of developing countries, usually represented by former colonies and dependent territories of almost all Western countries. After decolonization, they became the object of neocolonial exploitation by the former metropolises.
The West has no grounds left to claim the role of a supplier of "international public goods", be it terms of trade, a monetary and financial system controlled by it in its own interests, including the use of the dollar as a weapon in the "hybrid war" against Russia, or security in its traditional military-political reading.
And this in the context of interdependence in the global community, which has increased dramatically not only due to technological and other globalization, but also due to the emergence of common challenges and threats, such as climate change and international terrorism. These can only be addressed through the collective efforts of all States, regardless of their size or geopolitical status.
At the theoretical and strategic levels, the new situation in the world is analyzed in the Concept of Russia's Foreign Policy approved by President Vladimir Putin on March 31, 2023, and other documents of state strategic planning. They fill in, among other things, significant gaps in the cognitive order left as a legacy of the Soviet period of our political science and the long subsequent historical period of Europo-/Western-centrism, as it is commonly called, of our official political thought, dating back to Petrine modernization. The Foreign Policy Concept for the first time in 300 years defines Russia as a "distinctive state-civilization", which brings clarity not only to our cultural-civilizational self-determination, but also to our international positioning on the side of the non-Western World Majority in countering the slipping "unipolar moment" of global politics.
At the same time, it is important to emphasize that we do not reject our European heritage. The Concept explicitly refers to "deep historical ties with traditional European culture," which is not the same as Western civilization or Romano-Germanic Europe. Even Dostoevsky wrote about "stones and dead men" who are "dearer to us than they are to themselves" ("The Teenager"). It is remarkable and, perhaps, natural that the West "cancel" Russian culture, the heir to the best of European culture.
Actually, adequate comprehension of the current geopolitical situation, its origins and prospects for further evolution is impossible without the introduction of the categories of cultural and civilizational analysis, full restoration of the connection of times and historical continuity in relation to domestic socio-political and philosophical thought. Including the legacy of Fyodor Tyutchev, Nikolai Danilevsky, Konstantin Leontiev, Nikolai Berdyaev, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Eurasians and many others. Their ideas are in demand as never before, including in analyzing the systemic crisis of Western society and liberalism itself. The prophecies of Fyodor Dostoevsky, as well as the works of Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee and Samuel Huntington, which point to the conditionality of the elites' policy by cultural and civilizational factors, are becoming more relevant. The issues of identity and related themes of the fate and historical vocation of peoples are coming to the fore in world politics.
All this allows us to say that the transitional bipolarity of the West - World Majority is being replaced by a multipolarity that reflects and expresses the cultural and civilizational diversity of the world, the equality of different value systems and development models rooted in the culture and history of peoples. This is its natural state, which has been suppressed by the West for centuries. The transformation of the West into one of several civilizations, and of the North Atlantic into a region among others, is forthcoming.
Before the unity of the world community can be recreated, we must expect rapid regionalization, which is already taking place in Eurasia and East Asia, in Africa and Latin America, where everything is aimed at meeting the challenges of development. And in the world in its new form, it will no longer be a dialogue of civilizations, but their cooperation on the basis of equality and mutual respect, including the West's rejection of unificationism and interventionism. The BRICS format serves as a prototype of such interaction of cultures and civilizations.
With regard to Russia, the West made a conscious choice in favor of its "containment" and suppression, although it grossly miscalculated, as has happened many times in history. After such trials, Russia concentrated and became stronger. The protracted conflict in Ukraine has become a truly historic clarification of the uneasy eight-century relationship between Russia and the West, with multiple consequences. In their significance, they are similar to the consequences of world wars - a fundamental change in the balance of power and reformatting of the world order in accordance with the new realities and needs of global development.
In essence, the 30-year phase of uncertainty that began with the decision to expand NATO in 1994 is coming to an end in the development of international relations. It closed the prospect of a peaceful transition of the global community and European politics to a new state after the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the USSR and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact Organization. We are reaping the fruits of that missed opportunity today.
Rector of the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Foreign Ministry,
Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Russian Federation to Great Britain (2011-2019) Alexander Yakovenko.