“If the global West reverts to its old ways of direct or indirect dominance or outright arrogance, it will lose the battle. If it realises that the global South will be a key part of the next world order, it just might be able to forge both values-based and interest-based partnerships that can tackle the main challenges of the globe.”
This advice from Alexander Stubb, president of Finland, was given to readers of the influential US journal Foreign Affairs in January. Stubb subdivides global politics between 50 countries in the global West led by the United States, 25 in the global East led by China and 125 in the global South comprising many of the world’s developing and middle-income states from Africa, Latin America, South Asia, and southeast Asia.
Global order for decades to come will be negotiated in a triangular relationship between these three groups, he believes. He proposes the “values-based realism” he recommends for Finland could give the European Union and the West enough room to navigate it. The doctrine combines a continuing commitment to universalism, plus a recognition of differences in creating an equal and symmetric dialogue with the global East and South.
Stubb links this to a looming choice between multilateralism and multipolarity in global politics. Multilateralism, he says, “is a system of global co-operation that rests on international institutions and common rules. Its key principles apply equally to all countries, irrespective of size. Multipolarity, by contrast, is an oligopoly of power. The structure of a multipolar world rests on several, often competing poles”.
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Stubb has a distinguished academic, policy and political career on the centre right and socially liberal wings of the Finnish and EU political spectrum. He has developed excellent personal and golfing relations with Donald Trump. He wrote this article before US secretary of state Marco Rubio delivered his speech to the Munich security conference advocating a renewal of the West based on a shared civilisation of ethno-racial white identity, Christianity, settler-colonialism, opposition to immigration and restored imperial power. That would make Europe great again. He said the US has no intention of presiding over an orderly decline of the West.
Rubio’s speech fully confirms the Trump administration’s reactionary internationalism set out equally coherently in the US National Security Strategy. Based on an ideology demonising liberal political elites and non-white immigrants as hostile enemies rather than different others, it appeals to those who believe they have lost out to such forces. That explains its subversive international quality. Its support for dominance and cultural arrogance cut completely across the values Stubb believes must animate the West’s last chance to have a constructive dialogue with the emerging global order.
What might be the ingredients of an alternative progressive internationalism that could animate Europe’s centrists, liberals, lefts and greens in dialogue with the global East and South?
Some of them were outlined in a lecture this week to the Irish Association for Contemporary European Studies by John O’Brennan of Maynooth University. He made a strong case to complete EU enlargement towards central and eastern Europe and the Balkans. It should be rooted in “the us – and the future us” formula about European identity, based on the EU treaty which founds it “on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities”.
These values are now irretrievably entangled with the post-Cold War liberal internationalism Stubb recognises as a barrier to global dialogue given that its “future never arrived” after the US invasion of Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis and the Ukraine war. Realism now dictates an honest and equal dialogue with those who are different and prioritise values like fraternity and social solidarity over liberal freedoms.
[ Marco Rubio says US destiny ‘intertwined’ with Europe, but with caveatsOpens in new window ]
That includes those who take dialogue within and between different civilisations seriously as alternatives to liberal internationalism’s normative and power hierarchies. They range from reactionary versions like Rubio’s and Putin’s Russia to more pluralist and progressive ones in Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
Kishore Mahbubani, the veteran Singapore diplomat, welcomes Stubb’s honesty and realism but doubts the EU is capable of delivering on such a symmetrical and equal dialogue with a new world in which it is outnumbered and outflanked by the global East and South. Comparing EU attitudes to Ukraine and Gaza, he says its hypocrisy reminds others of an “adulterous priest who preaches marital fidelity in church”.
Acerbically, he concludes: “A good dialogue requires good listening. Unfortunately, the 12 per cent of the world’s population that lives in the West hasn’t yet learned the art of listening to the remaining 88 per cent with whom they share the planet.”
