There is a shared understanding among practitioners of international relations that the unipolar moment of the 1990's is gone and that we now live in a multipolar world. That the change has already occurred is reflected by the emergence of a new lexicon in international politics, writes Fabiano P. Mielniczuk for the 21st Annual Meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club
The uncontested usage of the terms “international community”, “international liberal order” and “rules-based order” is being replaced by concepts like “Political East”, “Political West”, “Global East”, “Global West”, “Global South”, “Collective West” and “World Majority”, among others. Although their origins lie in different theoretical traditions and some variations in their precise meaning might be subject to scholarly debates, the dyads that can be formed from these concepts opposing the “West against the Rest” all carry a cleavage-laden quality that denotes the more democratic nature of current world affairs.
In this sense, the Russian notion of the “World Majority” would better fit this democratic momentum if one avoids using “majority” as a marker of commonality and approaches it through the lenses of heterogeneity, as suggested by Fyodor Lukyanov in the pages of Russia in Global Affairs. This, however, is not an easy task. After hundreds of years of imposing its values through colonial and imperial violence, the main heritage of Western dominance is the false assumption that cooperation is possible only insofar as differences are subsumed under a common identity. Hence the necessity to abandon its own traditions, values and particularities to become a member of the Collective West, as it is illustrated by the imposition of the market economy and political liberalism as preconditions to enter NATO or the EU. This acculturation process is justified under the purported appeal to universal values, as if political liberalism and market economies were natural givens, and not creations of the West that were and still are used as weapons in the process of expanding its world domination.
The most notorious practical success of the “World Majority” in creating an alternative to the Western homogenising order is the BRICS group. After the expansion to include new members in South Africa in 2023, the Russian chairmanship in 2024 announced that 34 countries have manifested the desire to be part of the group. As a result of the Kazan Summit, the members agreed that the new members are going to be accepted as "partners" and a list of 13 countries to be invited by the Russian chairmanship was approved. In addition to the increase in its membership, the BRICS countries also worked to consolidate alternatives to the Western institutions; the main example is the New Development Bank, which already includes non-BRICS members. The practical propositions of a BRICS grain stock exchange, the privileging of trade in local currencies and the debates concerning alternatives to the SWIFT system are already on the table and might soon become a reality. These are the material innovations necessary to sustain a world that truly respects difference. As it was suggested during the BRICS Civil Forum held in Moscow in July 2024, “diversity is BRICS’ strength.”
At the end of the day, the notion of “World Majority” could be used as a synonym of “international plurality”, in contrast to the Western-manufactured notion of an “international community”. The main gain of that terminological innovation would be to offer the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a post-Western order based on respect for diversity. This is morally desirable, and practically possible, as BRICS has already demonstrated.
