I
Is the world inexorably becoming a contra-polar world? The present day war between the Russian Federation and Ukraine and Israel’s brutal military campaign in Gaza would seem to suggest so.
By contra-polar world we basically understand a situation where the global ‘order’ appears to be flying apart or breaking down while its constituent parts crash against each other as geo-political antagonisms become more intense and conflicts grow. So a contra-polar world would be characterised by chronic conflict and pitiless exterminatory violence spreading from the national or civil stage to the international plane and vice versa. A contra-polar world spells war’s return to regions that enjoyed decades of pacific stability, in part due to intensifying inter-state conflict. The chaos of a contra-polar world would be a stark contrast to the glacial bi-polar world of the Cold War which froze major conflict – at least in the developed First and Second World.
Centrifugal tendencies have broken down longstanding blocs and alliances and forced the realignment of nation-states as “hot wars” that were unimaginable in recent decades, become plausible scenarios once again. The Russian-Ukrainian war is exemplary in this respect. A victory for the Russian war machine would surely embolden Putin to launch further military adventures given the successful annexation of Crimea in 2014 inspired the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. So far imperial ‘forever wars’ carolled by a paranoid nationalist narrative of grievance and entitlement have helped to entrench the Russian elite’s power especially as any opposition has been cowed and curbed with hundreds of thousands of mainly young Russians opting to flee abroad. ‘Z’ for Russian victory would not only mean success in carving out a huge territorial chunk of its neighbour but also help Moscow reassert political control of Kiev again and this would almost certainly mean the euthanasia of Ukraine’s fledgling democratic revival.
Today the blasé pro-Moscow stance of Orban’s government in Hungary could feasibly spread to other countries and further nourish a willingness to temporise with Putin. There are many who are persuaded Putin’s Russia represents a grave threat to European peace and democracy and decry any stance with echoes of the earlier appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s on the grounds that such a policy is unlikely to forestall the European war it assiduously wishes to avoid.
Another example of the ‘slippage’ is Recep Erdogan’s coolly calculating political hardball over the accession of Finland and, especially, Sweden to NATO (delayed for two years) though this was at least manageable by the leadership of the defence alliance. More cause for concern must be Turkey’s strengthening economic ties with Moscow indicated by an increased reliance on Russian oil and gas, plans for Russia to build a nuclear power station in Turkey and Ankara’s determination to retain a Russian missile system despite Washington’s stern protests and sanctions. There was also a plan for Putin to visit Turkey in February 2024 (subsequently cancelled by Moscow).
Putin’s Russia is far from being a pariah on the world stage revealing major shifts in the geo-political order. Putin’s dubious re-election in March 2024 was welcomed beyond the ‘West’ in many countries including China, Brazil, India and various countries across the African continent. For example, Zimbabwe’s Electoral Commission declared Putin’s landslide victory (he ‘won’ 88% of the vote) “free, fair and credible.”
What is to be made of Putin’s ‘success’ in rehabilitating Russia’s position since 2022? How does it relate to an emerging contra-polar world? Firstly, it reflects Russia’s changing fortunes in the last year on the Ukrainian battlefield, Moscow’s shift to a ‘war economy’ and some success in circumventing Western sanctions across the world where Putin’s war of aggression was finessed as a defensive reaction to Western imperialism’s machinations. Clearly Ukraine’s faltering defence – running short of ordinance, missiles and military hardware, has encouraged Putin to believe the US will abandon Ukraine (perhaps with a Trump election victory) while reinforcing the wider appeal of the Kremlin’s paranoid narrative.
Yet the presumption of a ‘Russian renaissance’ must be qualified as Putin’s success has been limited – the economy is heavily reliant on fossil fuel wealth as a source of national income and these are highly vulnerable to fluctuations in global energy prices. The uptick in Russia’s battlefield fortunes has come at an enormous cost in treasure and manpower – casualties are high and reserves of military manpower are not inexhaustible as demonstrated by the Moscow’s use of prisoners in its army (thought to be over a 100,000 men with a high casualty rate). Also Russia’s “no limits” friendship with China (as Beijing characterises its strategic alliance) certainly does have limits – China receives Russian gas and oil at extremely generous discounts, access to Russian military technological know how as it upgrades and expands its military forces and nuclear arsenal. Despite supportive rhetoric China is less generous in return reflecting the altered power balance between the two countries. Though Russia and China have conducted large scale military exercises together Beijing isn’t as forthcoming supplying military hardware as Putin would wish and continues making diplomatic noises about respecting every nation’s sovereignty despite Moscow loudly proclaiming Taiwan belongs to China (1).
But what does Russia’s international support tell us about the decline of American power? This has been an ever present debate since 9/11. The US has over 750 bases throughout the world in at least 80 countries (perhaps more as the US military presence in some countries is secret). So the US military is present in almost every part of the world as its sea, land air forces enjoy a global reach. A 2022 report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute noted the US accounted for 39% of global arms spending (3.5% share of its GDP or $877 billion) compared to its nearest superpower rival China which accounted for 13% of global arms spending (1.6% share of its GDP or $292 billion). Other rivals for global military strength trail even further behind US spending levels. For another comparison Russia accounted for just 3.9% of global arms spending. The 2022 estimates of the Institute for Strategic Studies (ISS) were slightly different but its top four global arms spenders: US, China, Russia and India, were identical with the US again outdistancing its main rivals.
Even so signs of US decrepitude are unmistakable though one of the remarkable features of Pax Americana is that for years it seemed gauche to talk of an American empire like earlier historical incarnations of empire despite its overall formidable power. Though US economic and military power underpinned the global order after the Second World War, Washington faced a systemic rival – the Soviet Union – during post-war decades also convulsed by the anti-colonial revolution and decolonisation. Clearly ‘illusions’ about the fundamental benevolence of US hegemony owed something to its far reaching global power.
Today the arms of smaller countries can’t be twisted so readily as they once were as rival power centres have newly arisen while the former respect (and fear) of the US has weakened. While the intangible decline of American power certainly predates Trump’s 2016-20 Presidency, what we might call the ‘Trump effect’ has added to the loss of the US’s global authority. Critically, for its old allies the US is no longer a safe port in a storm or the reliable friend of yesteryear. Even if Biden’s White House term had been matchless it could never have fully rehabilitated the US’s reputation. Added to this that what seemed truly improbable after his ejection from office – a second coming of Trump may well come to pass in November 2024.
NATO’s break-up would surely be nearer if the New Isolationism of Trump’s ‘America First’ replaced the internationalism of the US’s post-war global security architecture, with a second Trump term. Given this destabilising possibility we have to assume a wider European war would be more likely, Russia more bellicose. Recently, urging continuing solidarity with Ukraine, Poland’s new Prime Minister Donald Tusk claimed Europe’s post-war peace was finished with the entrance of a pre-war period. Though Putin’s invasion of Ukraine exposed certain limitations of the Russian war machine, the Kremlin has sympathisers in Europe – not Poland or the Baltic states to be sure but in Hungary and Serbia and a certain ‘red-brown’ constituency uniting elements of the the socially conservative and Populist right and sections of the left who see Putin as part of the ‘axis of resistance’ against US imperialism. Europe will probably have to increase defence spending as a proportion of GDP to counter Russia whose own spending has risen considerably during its Ukrainian war. But there are limits to checking Russian belligerence because of the degree of impunity owning the world’s largest nuclear arsenal allows.
The contra-polar world would dispel the brief uni-polar world that followed the Soviet Union’s collapse. Then the US was the undisputed superpower of the global order when George Bush Jr’s coterie of neo-con hawks hailed a New American Century before their hubris dissolved in the conjunctural collision of US imperial misadventures, the rise of China and the abrupt arrival of that asymmetrical social force Jihadist Islam determined to hurl back the global power of that Rome on the Potomac.
Whatever followed the US’s singular ascendancy, whether it was a multi-polar or a bi-polar world (the US versus a surging China), the contra-polar world currently emerging would not only amplify trends generating war, ethnic cleansing, genocide and the rest, but would do so as all the previous unitary, integrative processes – the institutions of world governance, international law, and globalisation were weakening.
Naturally many observers argue endemic, fratricidal war have been indelible features of the system for decades especially in the ‘zones of exception’ pockmarking the globe. It’s difficult to gainsay this fundamental reality in the age of Putin and pitiless counter-revolution to quell popular insurgencies like that of the ‘Arab Spring’, Belarus or Myanmar. But all this against the backdrop of climate breakdown shows things can get far worse.
II
Momentarily Paths and Bridges imagined we had coined the neologism contra-polar world to capture this new world blasted by war and related forms of mass killing that could become a central feature of relations between developed nation-states – very much a case of Leviathan redux. But a cursory online search shows the notion has some pre-history. Since 2012 a retired Indian Navy Commander C. Uday Bhaskar has written various comment and opinion pieces for the Indian press and sites like Global Trends 2030 (with links to US intelligence), using the term contra-polar world.
In a 2012 article Bhaskar described a “polycentric world” of multiple centres of power; a world shaped like a “heptagon” – seven sided and uneven dominated by seven major but contrasting power blocs: the US, Russia, China, the EU, India, Japan and Brazil. The US, the EU and Japan formed a strategic bloc while Russia and China were both countries “conscious of their non-Western orientation.” Russia’s governing elite reaffirmed this difference following a brief moment after the Soviet system’s collapse when it was hoped Russia’s political system would converge with the West. Recall Bhaskar was writing after Moscow’s short, successful war against Georgia in 2008 but before Russia and China’s deepening rapprochement accelerated by 2014 annexation of Crimea and especially the 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
So the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) were contrasted to the ‘West’ – though India and Brazil are representative democracies, democracy is undergoing a stern test in both these countries and though Bolsonaro proved more electorally ephemeral than Narendra Modi and the BJP, a comeback can’t be excluded in this global Populist moment while Javier Melei’s Presidential triumph in Argentina shows Latin America’s appetite for Populist demagogues is far from exhausted. Back in 2012 Bhaskar claimed China would overtake the US within two decades as the biggest economy, speculating about how China’s new economic power would bolster its geo-political influence in the Far East Asia and beyond. According to Bhaskar this shift in the global power balance would inevitably lead Beijing to challenge the US led bloc on various issues.
There is an important subtext to Bhaskar’s geo-political reflections that are understandably Delhi-centric, reflecting the rise of India itself as a major power in its own right that is increasingly concerned to project the power commensurate with its growing economic status within an ever evolving global order. Therefore it’s no surprise a former Indian naval commander should focus on the China-India-Japan triangle, how their competitive interactions might reorder global power relations especially their part in breaking down the “binary division of the Cold War.” Speaking of the two global superpowers, would the US stand idly by as China tried to achieve hegemony in South East Asia? Eyeing China’s rise, the Obama administrations (2008-16) had already begun a ‘pivot to Asia’ (Hilary Clinton) to improve trade but also refocus the US’s strategic military priorities for the C21st. There is a greater emphasis on containing China’s own ambitions and military strength. Taiwan has been one recent flashpoint between Washington and Beijing while China’s errant ally North Korea, has proven an irritant to both capitals.
Back in 2012 Bhaskar claimed countries like Brazil and India would be bellwethers, acting as “swing states” between the two superpowers. Such a stance might also mean cleaving a ‘third way’ path or a studied neutrality – a prospect that for Paths and Bridges implies greater geo-political volatility and a degree of adversarial realpolitik towards the ‘West.’
Yet for all the ink spilled about the palpable decline of US power and China’s superpower rise, there are truly unpredictable elements fuelling the contra-polar world. Firstly, the anthropogenic climate breakdown mentioned above and secondly, the ideological headwinds political liberalism and democracy faced both internally – Populism, Trump and so forth, and externally, with the emergence of the new authoritarianism determined to challenge US power and reshape the international order whether it’s Putin’s rebarbative, paranoid style of authoritarian politics committing Russia to maintaining a permanent ‘war economy’ and engage in “forever wars” funded by its fossil fuel wealth. Accordingly the propaganda of the state-controlled media suggests the ‘West’ is conspiring to destroy Mother Russia like previous external enemies. Historical precedent reveals relinquishing empire is hard reinforcing the authoritarian idea countries like Ukraine can’t be allowed to lead a genuinely independent existence.
The Kremlin might calculate that “forever wars” would help Putin’s ruling faction keep their grip on the ship of state while keeping political rivals off balance and that such a course, if it didn’t Make Russia Great Again would arrest the decline in Russia’s status that followed the Soviet Union’s collapse. Obviously, the downside for the Kremlin would be military setbacks and war weariness taking hold of a sullen Russian population. Until the invasion of Ukraine, Putin had enjoyed a number of military successes – the levelling of Grozny, Georgia, the annexation of Crimea, stabilising Bashir al-Assad’s rule in Syria but Putin’s campaign against Kiev exposed underlying weaknesses in the Russian military machine.
III
War means that Leviathan isn’t redundant in the C21st. Globalisation and neoliberalism are widely assumed to have unleashed a process of globalised precarity defined by Wendy Brown as the ‘waning of sovereignty.’ But the reality was more complex. Neoliberalism and globalisation were often presumed to be the antipodes of the nation-state. However in many respects they were bedfellows, part of a process of the reordering of the state which in turn operated as a crowbar to open up areas of social life previously removed from the logic of the market and possessive individualism (every individual becomes a “speck of capital” as late Foucault argued).
There has been much debate on possible global trajectories, of the shape of the coming ‘geo-political’ in various social scientific fields. A recent, interesting prognosis discussed here for its relevance to our contra-polar world hypothesis is a 2011 essay by genocide scholar Mark Levene who linked the “prospects” of genocide (his word) to the potential collapse of civilisation or even omnicide thanks to climate breakdown (2).
From its inception Levene’s scholarship linked genocide to the rise of nation-state, inter-state rivalry and war. Genocide has been a constant of the modern world from the C19th through to the first quarter of our present century. Genocide would metastasise as climate breakdown became severer amplifying the fragility of every state and functioning as a ‘threat multiplier’ (growing resource scarcity, climate refugees and so on).
Levene was a leading scholar of genocide before his study of its causes led him to widen his purview while respecting Raphael Lemkin’s original strictures on coining the term genocide in 1944 (it was adopted by the UN in 1948), to focus on the specific historical context of genocide and avoid over generalisation. The Nazi campaign in eastern Europe and the Holocaust was the immediate inspiration for Lemkin’s original formulation but though the extermination of European Jewry was evidently exceptional in many respects Lemkin believed it belonged to a class of similar events like the 1915-16 Armenian genocide and imperial Germany’s genocidal campaigns against the Hererro and Nama people in South West Africa early in the C20th.
Our immediate topic isn’t genocide or the classificatory controversies about what distinguishes it from other forms of mass killing in the modern age, what makes it such a radical, aberrant rupture – a distinction we fully accept. So the explanatory utility (and political charge) of genocide as a concept is absolutely indispensable for understanding the world today. Levene argues at length that genocide (and mass violence in general) requires certain pre-conditions. For Levene modernity’s emergence and the rise of the nation-state pursuing resource access and maximising wealth creation entailed perpetual conflict. The ‘West’ was a potent nexus of predatory actors, technological take off, and a military revolution that all over-determined the original Great Acceleration.
Though colonialism expired, the post-colonial state was driven by similar imperatives to develop the productive apparatus to ensure its survival in the competitive global system. The ‘metropolitan core’ retained overall hegemony at least until the recent challenge of the BRIC societies reflected in the unmistakable ‘provincialisation of the West.’ The efforts of post-colonial states to hothouse economic development and ‘catch up’ with the ‘West’ has often meant ‘shortcuts’ like state driven autarkic development, fostering sharp social conflict based on existing social divisions (often survivals of the colonial era).
Interestingly Levene proposed a 3 Tier model of the competitive inter-state system: (Tier 1) wealthy developed countries – the first comers of the modern world system like the ‘liberal West’; (Tier 2) the vast majority of modern states like the countries of the former Soviet bloc; (Tier 3) the weakest, poorest states already broken by the competitive race of the state system like the states of sub-Saharan Africa. Accordingly Tier 3 states were often subject to endemic social conflict including exterminatory violence and genocide. In contrast Tier 1 states are relatively insulated from genocidal violence though they are often indirectly responsible for the same elsewhere because of colonial legacies, their political sponsorship of malign anti-democratic actors or their stewardship of global economic governance. An example, would be the relationship between colonial Belgium and ‘the Congo’ arcing to the late C20th war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) that was the bloodiest war since the Second World War but received little of the news coverage of many smaller conflicts.
Yet Levene considered Tier 2 states to be the most vulnerable to genocide because they were relatively strong states subject to the powerful competitive pressures of the inter-state system. Tier 2 states were vigorously pursuing development – often either catch up or keep up – to remain in the game or break into the Tier 1 Club. Arguably there are classificatory issues with Tier 2 states that in his account includes China and Russian at one pole and Rwanda and Burundi at the other. Almost two decades on this characterisation of China can certainly be challenged and while Russia is often deemed an ‘economic basket case’ having been divested of much of its informal empire and undergone declining population during the ruinous shock transition to the market economy. Today Russia is extremely reliant on its vast fossil fuel reserves (some problem some might say) though it remains a military superpower with the world’s biggest nuclear arsenal despite its self-inflicted Ukrainian travails.
So summarising, we have a three-way reciprocal relationship: the global system of states and world economy with its competitive pressures, each particular national conjuncture and climate breakdown. On this last Levene registers the fundamental reality that unsustainable national development and growth outstrips the ‘carrying capacity’ of the biosphere, feeding an increase in GHG emissions. As states are are hit by climate breakdown, all forms of civil conflict and martial violence will intensify.
Levene suggests two possible future scenarios: business as usual – growing population pressures, resource shortages resulting from over-exploitation and competition, as destabilising factors. Globally differentiated levels of consumption (vanishing in sub-Saharan Africa but grotesquely outsized in North America) translate into many Earths needed to sustain the consumption levels of the developed world. Inevitably resource scarcity means conflict and war with a genocidal escalation one possible outcome of such conflicts. The most powerful, developed states belonging to the Tier 1 and upper end of the Tier 2 club, are able to seize hold of, pay for or exploit these resources more readily than the weaker states of the lower end of Tier 2 and Tier 3 states. Levene discusses some concrete examples of how demand for resources like rare metals used in semi-conductors and computers created by, say, Western corporations or the Chinese state can create civic instability, poverty, internecine conflict and war in Tier 3 states due to factors like a weak state (lacking territorial legitimacy, inherited deep ethnic divisions as with many post-colonial states, and so on). As in the case of ‘warlordism’, a weak state may face other non-state actors simultaneously fighting for wealth and territory.
Levene recounts the dubious role played by British and British-Dutch corporations in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the British state’s defiance of UN injunctions to investigate the role of British business indirectly sponsoring conflict by creating the demand for the mineral wealth while also surreptitiously backing certain forces and actors and thereby destabilising society and state. Interestingly Britain is home to a number of globally operating Private Military Companies (PMCs) like Executive Outcomes UK that operate in various African countries in areas where British or British-Dutch oil companies have concessions from the state but face opposition from local or indigenous peoples. Paths and Bridges blog has previously noted the role of para-state military organisations and war machines in various ‘zones of exception’ or regions where the Tier 3 state is particularly weak (or often characterised as ‘failed states’ in IR parlance).
Such complex conflicts like the 1998-2002 war in DRC were an arena for the malign intervention of Tier 1 states (or rather corporations based in Tier 1 states, pursuing business as usual) but also other Tier 3 states like Uganda and Zimbabwe that produced not only an ecological crisis but also a “planetary backlash” according to Levene using language, whether consciously or not, framing the ecological crisis in Lovelockian terms that implies the biosphere itself is becoming an actor (4).
Levene doesn’t pursue his off the cuff observation (few do) but he does link the ecological crisis to increasing incidences of genocide and as a sort of ‘special case’ he introduces the notion of mass genocidal displacement linked to climate breakdown. Questions are prompted about whether this phenomenon would truly fit the definition of genocide given the absence of intention (no matter how capaciously genocide was understood or how low the bar of intention).
An example of this scenario, Levene explores a genocide within wider mass genocidal displacement – the fate of the indigenous people of Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tract (CHT) brutally displaced by the Bangladeshi state over decades pursuing growth and ‘development’ and access to timber, fresh water mineral wealth. The state unleashed the army and Muslim radicals against the hill peoples of the CHT (mostly animists and Buddhists) who were only 0.5% of Bangladesh’s population. Many were killed while thousands fled across the border to India.
Today Bangladesh (a riverine delta region on the Bay of Bengal) faces the existential challenge of climate breakdown. Sea level rise and powerful cyclones have already permanently displaced 70 million Bangladeshi’s in a country with a population of 140 million people. As people abandon the delta, the population of the capital Dhaka swells further while its neighbour India embarks on constructing a 2,000 mile wall on its border with Bangladesh.
Levene concludes that business as usual allied to climate breakdown with increasingly disruptive earth systems feedback loops will not only increase the incidence of genocide but weaken international norms of humanitarian solidarity. Levene notes how the ranks of stateless people – are not only growing rapidly but are literally invisible. In Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2017), Wendy Brown presented an acute diagnosis of how states (Levene’s Tier 1 and Tier 2 societies), adopted ‘walling’ – erecting walls to stop the flow of trans-national migration or create an impermeable barrier for terrorists, criminals, smugglers or migrants. ‘Walling’ was a response to securitarian fears and xenophobia of its citizens resulting from economic precarity and the anxiety that globalisation was eroding national and political sovereignty. Clearly elites and politicians are not simply responding or reacting but proactively conducting a high degree of political steering of the population.
In some places walls – part of a notable global trend of carceralisation and securitisation of societies – were erected to imprison a particular demographic group (regarded as Other) in whole or in part like the ethnic Uyghur people in China’s Xinjiang province where a Chinese government campaign against Muslim ‘terrorism’ led to 1.8 million Uyghur being detained for re-education (cultural genocide according to many critics) in vast internment camps. Also Israel’s ‘security’ wall between Israel and Gaza (built with cheap Palestinian labour) is discussed at length by Brown – years before Hamas’s 7 October attack in 2023.
Brown doubted these walls – like the US-Mexico wall – were truly effective in their stated aim. Instead walls securitised and regulated migration (and therefore labour) rather than halted it. Walls created fungible, undocumented and cheap labour while even politicians who were cognizant of the fundamental limits of walls and borders, nevertheless genuflected before the presumed necessity of ‘walling’ that actually had various purposes including the symbolic function of affirming the national, ethnic or political identity of the ‘in’ group or territorial based political community that in democratic and political theory was the basis of political sovereignty.
Crucially Brown disagrees with this last foundational assumption of liberal or democratic theory. Instead Brown appears to affirm the superiority of Carl Schmitt’s concept of political sovereignty which trumped the classical theories of democracy and sovereignty held by Locke and Rousseau. So Locke’s account of democracy was dismissed as compromised by its admission that sovereignty ultimately resided in the executive branch of Leviathan rather than the people. If we follow the logic of this critique, it’s the executive that ultimately exercises oversight not the people – the executive occupying the cockpit of Leviathan directing policy whose choices were ultimately revealed to be fundamentally decisionistic. Equally Rousseau’s theory of democracy was found wanting because it was utopian.
So the specific political community constituting the foundation of sovereignty was illusory because sovereignty was actually lodged in Leviathan. In this sense it’s hard to avoid concluding that Brown endorses Schmitt’s realism and his understanding that the central political contradiction of the modern world was the friend/enemy distinction. This is not the place to fully unpack this democratic scepticism; the sense that democracy (liberal or representative democracy) must collapse under the weight of its contradictions, that it equals a façade (and charade) of power – a scepticism echoed in Achille Mbembe’s critique of the “nocturnal” underbelly of Occidental democracy (racist, exclusionary and potentially genocidal).
In what is described as the post-Westphalian era (in the sense of post qua following as opposed to post qua end of the Westphalian era), Brown argues that while it’s premature to say national sovereignty is exhausted it has undergone erosion due to globalisation. If we add the impact of climate breakdown then ‘walling’ and the effort to stop climate refugees or trans-national migration, lead to the re-territorialization of the world. Levene himself contrasts the opposed imperatives of globalization and territorialization.
Levene discusses manifestations of re-territorialization in Tier 1 and Tier 2 societies – for example the Pentagon planning for unprecedented geo-political chaos due to abrupt, violent climate breakdown, walls, militarised borders and detention camps. The retreat from international law, humanitarian commitments, the embrace of walls, militarised borders, detention camps (many outsourced, on different continents). All these are born of realpolitik that ultimately lacks realism because the severity of climate breakdown is denied.
So there is Fortress America and Fortress Europe – both are as cruel as they are porous and their porosity enrages some citizens even further prompting further demands for stronger controls, bigger walls, more draconian punishments for ‘illegal’ migrants and refugees. All are short sighted responses in the final analysis because if business as usual remains the default no society, no matter how developed or powerful, will be able to outrun climate breakdown. Levene even suggests civilisational collapse is on the horizon: a “Hobbesian zero-sum game” or “a truly post-genocidal landscape in which atrocity is not simply the norm as perpetuated by the simple condition of extreme scarcity…” (5).
The scenario of civilisational collapse is increasingly seen as plausible by numerous observers. Paths and Bridges believes there are powerful centrifugal tendencies at work as the global space is subject to splintering and territorialization with the entropy of longstanding alliances and blocs. Some of these developments reflect shifting allegiances and new alliances but some also reveal a novel willingness by Leviathan to embark on re-territorialization and the consolidation of borders including annexation and (re)-claim back what was ceded to globalisation. This implies war in parts of the world beyond the benighted ‘zones of exception’ promising defiance of international law and a reawakened willingness to use force to achieve strategic, geo-political goals.
Our conclusion is a tentative at present – selecting certain historical trends while no doubt neglecting other equally significant developments. So it hardly seems plausible that globalisation will be totally reversed or that we will see a new age of autarkic nation-states cum ‘permanent war economies.’ Thinking of Putin’s Russia, the Kremlin is both pursuing a policy of revanchist re-territorialization (seizing hold of Crimea, eastern Ukraine, trying to re-impose its leadership on its immediate neighbours) and a path of alternative globalisation, meaning creating new diplomatic links and partnerships with other nation-states by exchanging oil, gas, arms and nuclear know how for a range of products and commodities (as well as currency) embargoed by Western sanctions after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
We don’t think a scenario of alternative globalisation contradicts the picture of an emerging contra-polar world. The two trends are complementary. Who are the ‘new’ allies of Putin’s Russia? Beyond the many alt right and alt left sympathisers in Tier 1 and 2 states they are generally authoritarian states like Russia itself, states from Europe like Orban’s Hungary and Serbia, states from the global South with their own sour view of the ‘West’ or democratic back sliders.
We have suggested a contra-polar world would also be a world of an emerging alternative globalisation but where would the main fault line of this last lie? The contra-polar world has a grave ideological component. Paths and Bridges think this would be the opposition between embattled democracy, currently on the back foot and untiringly identified by its enemies with compromised liberalism, against the new authoritarianism of Putin, Xi Ping and Modi. Presently Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza which at the time of writing has killed 32,000 Palestinians and created conditions approaching famine, has provoked widespread condemnation especially in the global South where few doubt Israel is responsible for ethnic cleansing if not genocide. Yet in the ‘West’ despite some muted criticism of Netanyahu’s brutal campaign the ‘G’ word is barely mentioned.
The ‘West’ rightly condemned Putin’s aggression against Ukraine, invoking international law, respect for national sovereignty, human rights and democracy against the despotism of the new authoritarianism. The double standards displayed by Washington, London, Berlin, Paris and other Western capitals are hard to ignore and have the effect of truly ‘provincializing the West’, exposing as hollow its claims to defend without favour universal values of human rights. Also the reservoir of social conservatives who admire Putin the Strongman and the defender of the Church and family, is only one strand of a pernicious Populism whose appeal in the US is undercutting the old realpolitik (and internationalism) of Washington.
Facing challenges at home and abroad – defending democracy necessarily requires its renovation given the flaws of representative democracy in developed but increasingly inegalitarian societies. Yet the defence is necessary. If democracy becomes hollowed out, a facade or Masque of the Populist circus, then authoritarian decisionism will come further to the fore. When Leviathan embarks on re-territorialisation then citizens are divested of the sovereignty arrogated by the state. This global tendency is leading to the crystallisation of the contra-polar world and reinforcing a catastrophic will to war.
Jules Etjim April 2024
NOTES
(1) See Lawrence Freedman’s Comment is Freed blog and the guest post Putin and Beyond: Making Russia Great Again? (Roderic Lyne 10 March 2024).
(2) Mark Levene ‘From Past to Future: The Prospects for Genocide and Its Avoidance in the C21st’ (2011) with an updated version appearing in Genocide: Key Themes (2022) pp.366-98, edited Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses.
(3) Wendy Brown Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2017).
(4) Among Lovelock’s many works on the theme of Gaia (earth) and its life systems as an active agency see in particular James Lovelock The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back – and How We Can Still Save Humanity (2006).
(5) Levene cited p.388.
