When Xi Jinping hosted 53 African leaders at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing this month, they issued a joint declaration that attracted little attention or comment. But an unobtrusive line towards the end of the statement caused some of the western diplomats watching in the hall to sit up and take notice.
“We will stay committed to the vision of common, comprehensive, co-operative and sustainable security, work together to implement the GSI, and carry out early co-operation under the Initiative,” the leaders said.
The GSI is the Global Security Initiative, one of three big diplomatic initiatives launched by Xi in recent years and a central instrument in China’s ambition to reshape the global security order. It is a direct and explicit challenge to the United States-led “rules-based international order” which Beijing dismisses as “fake multilateralism, fake rules, fake human rights and fake democracy”.
At the core of the GSI are six commitments: common, comprehensive, co-operative, and sustainable security; respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity of all countries; abiding by the purpose and principles of the UN Charter; taking the security concerns of all countries seriously; peacefully resolving disputes between countries through dialogue; and maintaining security in both traditional and non-traditional fields. Some of these are less anodyne than they appear.
When Xi talks about taking the security concerns of all countries seriously, for example, he also embraces the principle of indivisible security. What this means is that any move by a sovereign state to strengthen its security ties with another country could affect the “reasonable security concerns” of a third country.
“The sovereignty, security, and development interests of any country should be protected, and the reasonable security concerns of any country should receive respect,” the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CIRIC) a think tank close to China’s intelligence services, wrote in an explanation of the GSI a few weeks after Xi launched the initiative in April 2022.
“In the recent Ukraine crisis, Nato, led by the United States, ignored the principle of the indivisibility of security and blindly pursued eastward expansion. This violated the pan-European security arrangement, and instead gave rise to the current security crisis in Europe. Military alliances and group confrontations will only jeopardise world peace. Only by taking seriously each other’s reasonable security concerns and building a balanced, effective, and sustainable security architecture can we achieve universal security and common security and find the path to a long-term solution to global security challenges.”
Securing the public endorsement for the GSI of almost every African state, many of which have security ties with the US, was a diplomatic achievement for Beijing. It also reflects a growing impatience across the Global South with an architecture of global governance that does not reflect the reality of today’s multipolar world.
The Cold War produced a bipolar international system that saw the US and the Soviet Union holding sway over most of the world’s political and economic resources. The early 1990s saw a shift towards a unipolar system with the US as the unrivalled global leader but that era has now ended.
The new century has seen the rise of China, the return of Russia as an antagonist of the US and the growing confidence of middle powers such as Saudi Arabia, Brazil and South Africa as well as India, a near-superpower. Regional organisations such as the European Union (EU), the African Union (AU), the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) have grown in importance.
When the US failed to win UN security council authorisation for its invasion of Iraq in 2003, it formed a “coalition of the willing”. Minilateralism, the formation of small alliances or groups of like-minded countries, such as the Quad made up of the US, India, Japan and Australia has become more common.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) a trade and investment network stretching across Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America is one of the most ambitious examples of minilateralism. But there are ever more numerous, smaller groupings focusing on everything from defence to economic development.
The Group of Seven (G7) industrialised states made up of the US, Japan, Germany, France, Italy, Britain and Canada has become Washington’s preferred forum for marshalling its global resources in a contest it frames as one between democracies and autocracies. An informal grouping with no permanent secretariat, the G7 has expanded from a club where leaders co-ordinated economic policy to the high table for western policy formation on everything from sanctioning Russia to confronting China in the South China Sea.
The G20, which also includes countries such as China, India, Russia, Brazil and South Africa, played an important role during the 2007-2008 financial crisis. It remains one of the few forums where the US and Chinese leaders meet but the group has failed to live up to early expectations that it might supplant the G7.
Brics, originally made up of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, has instead emerged as an alternative pole of influence to the G7. Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) joined Brics at the beginning of this year, Saudi Arabia has been offered membership and Turkey this month applied to join.
Ideologically heterogenous and with diverse strategic outlooks, the Brics is less a geopolitical bloc than a kind of coalition of the unwilling. What they have in common is a shared conviction that the current system of global governance is outdated and unfair and a determination to challenge it.
The Brics want to see a more equitable, multipolar world order and they question the legitimacy of western dominance of international institutions. The increasing use by the US and the EU of “unilateral” sanctions, imposed without a UN mandate, has also alarmed Brics countries, encouraging them to build mechanisms that could make such targeting less effective.
This has seen Brics countries increasing the amount of trade with one another that is denominated in their own currencies rather than in US dollars. Although most Brics countries belong to what the US views as the democratic world, they have not rallied behind Washington during the Ukraine war and have continued to attend meetings of the group this year, with Russia in the chair.
Three years ago, Richard Haass and Charles Kupchan called for the formation of a Global Concert of Powers made up of the US, China, the EU, India, Japan and Russia. The idea was inspired by the Concert of Europe, a 19th century exercise in minilateralism that saw Britain, France, Russia, Prussia and Austria preserve peace in the Continent for half a century.
The Concert of Europe was based on a mutual commitment to regular communication and the peaceful resolution of disputes to uphold the territorial settlement that ended the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. The new global concert would hold regular summits and members would send delegations to a permanent headquarters, as would regional organisations such as the African Union, the Arab League and ASEAN.
Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the attempt by the US and the EU to exclude Russia from the international system shut down any prospect of a new forum for global co-operation. Now that both sides in the Ukraine war are starting to think about peace, the idea of a global concert to maintain such a peace could yet come back under consideration.
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