Description
Five hundred years of Western hegemony is ending, while the global majority’s aspiration for a world order based on multipolarity and sovereign equality is rising. This incisive book addresses the demise of liberal hegemony, though pointing out that a multipolar Westphalian world order has not yet taken shape, leaving the world in a period of interregnum. A legal vacuum has emerged, in which the conflicting sides are competing to define the future order.
NATO expansionism was an important component of liberal hegemony as it was intended to cement the collective hegemony of the West as the foundation for a liberal democracies-imposed peace. Instead, it dismantled the pan-European security architecture and set Europe on the path to war without the possibility of a course correction. Ukraine as a divided country in a divided Europe has been a crucial pawn in the great power competition between NATO and Russia for the past three decades.
The war in Ukraine is a symptom of the collapsing world order. The war revealed the dysfunction of liberal hegemony in terms of both power and legitimacy, and it sparked a proxy war by the West against Russia instead of ensuring peace, the source of its legitimacy.
The proxy war, unprecedented sanctions, and efforts to isolate Russia in the wider world contributed to the demise of liberal hegemony. Much of the world responded to the war by intensifying their transition to a Eurasian world order that rejects hegemony and liberal universalism. The economic architecture is being reorganized as the world diversifies away from excessive reliance on Western technologies, industries, transportation corridors, banks, payment systems, insurance systems, and currencies. Universalism based on Western values is replaced by civiliational distinctiveness, sovereign inequality is swapped with sovereign equality, imposition is replaced by negotiation, and the rules-based international order is discarded in favor of international law. A Westphalian world order is reasserting itself, although with Eurasian characteristics.
The West’s defeat of Russia would restore the unipolar world order while a Russian victory would cement a multipolar one. The international system is now at its most dangerous as the prospect for compromise is absent, meaning the winner will take all. Both NATO under US direction and Russia are therefore prepared to take great risks and escalate, making nuclear annihilation an increasingly likely prospect.
PEPE ESCOBAR –
“Apart from a meticulous deconstruction of the proxy war in Ukraine that devastatingly debunks, with proven facts, the official NATOstan narrative, Diesen offers a concise, easily accessible mini-history of how we got here….Diesen is one of the very few Western analysts who actually understands the drive to multipolarity.” PEPE ESCOBAR, Zerohedge.com
ALASTAIR CROOKE –
“Professor Diesen has addressed the geopolitical issue of our era – and likely beyond. What is the future geo-politics: How will states interact between themselves in the future? Does the shift to multipolarity championed by Russia and China, hold the promise of more harmony or simply the move to a different mode of contention? He traces the irruption of the powerful nation-state notion of Westphalia, through the Pax American ‘forever wars’ – to the waning of the Rules Order presented as the mandatory ‘vision for all’
Diesen shows how Ukraine became the rock that holed the Western myth below the waterline – and discusses the likely tribulations a new world order will certainly encounter.
An important read. Important insights – as we need to face up to the unwelcome task of challenging our own preconceptions and having to navigate in an unfamiliar (non-western) landscape – where old steady handholds simply – are no longer present. No longer there.Professor Diesen has addressed the geopolitical issue of our era – and likely beyond. What is the future geo-politics: How will states interact between themselves in the future? Does the shift to multipolarity championed by Russia and China, hold the promise of more harmony or simply the move to a different mode of contention? He traces the irruption of the powerful nation-state notion of Westphalia, through the Pax American ‘forever wars’ – to the waning of the Rules Order presented as the mandatory ‘vision for all’
Diesen shows how Ukraine became the rock that holed the Western myth below the waterline – and discusses the likely tribulations a new world order will certainly encounter.
An important read. Important insights – as we need to face up to the unwelcome task of challenging our own preconceptions and having to navigate in an unfamiliar (non-western) landscape – where old steady handholds simply – are no longer present. No longer there.”
ALASTAIR CROOKE, former British diplomat