From Multilaterality to Multipolarity: The Struggle for a New Global Order

From Multilaterality to Multipolarity: 

The Struggle for a New Global Order 

The crisis of multilateralism is no longer unfolding—it has arrived. What was once touted as a cornerstone of postwar stability now lies in tatters. Western-led institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO), International Monetary Fund (IMF), and United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) either stand paralyzed or function as empty rituals. As Walden Bello recently remarked during the IDEAs conference in Barcelona, “The key institutions of western-led globalization are no longer functioning or are in sleep mode.” The death of multilateralism, he argued, is not simply an event—it is a long-unfolding process, now openly acknowledged even by those who once upheld it.

What replaces this decaying architecture is still uncertain. But emerging in its wake is a contested and uneven multipolarity, a term increasingly debated in both radical and mainstream geopolitical discourse. For Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, multipolarity is not merely a redistribution of unipolar power but the expression of “fundamentally different civilizational codes.” It is not the same world with new players—it is potentially a new world altogether.

Yet herein lies both the promise and peril of this historical transition.

End of the Liberal International Order 

 The collapse of multilateralism did not begin with Donald Trump, but he dramatized its end. As Walden Bello observes, “It is Trump… who has cut the cant, shed the hypocrisy, and sounded the death knell on the grand strategy of liberal internationalism.” What Trump did was not to dismantle the liberal order singlehandedly, but to accelerate a retreat already in motion—a long withdrawal from the moral and institutional commitments that once underpinned U.S. global leadership. The so-called “rules-based international order” had always masked an architecture of dominance, designed to legitimize and protect U.S. state power and the interests of transnational capital. 

 In the economic realm, the decay is undeniable. Since the collapse of the WTO’s Fifth Ministerial in Cancun in 2003, global trade negotiations have been paralyzed. The IMF and World Bank, though deeply implicated in the debt crises of the Global South, refuse to implement reforms that would grant voting power commensurate with the real economic weight of countries like China, Brazil, and South Africa. Climate finance, meanwhile, has proven woefully inadequate: the $58 billion offered to developing countries is dwarfed by the $1 trillion in annual damages they suffer from climate disasters largely caused by industrialized nations. 

 But perhaps nowhere is the erosion of multilateralism more evident than in the exercise of U.S. military power. The recent strikes on Iran—conducted without United Nations sanction or even regional consensus—represent not a break, but a continuation of a longer trend. Washington no longer hides behind the fig leaf of coalition-building. It acts unilaterally, preemptively, and without apology. “The UNFCCC will continue to meet,” Bello writes, “but the reality is that negotiations are dead in the water.” 

 In this context, Russian theorist Alexander Dugin offers a useful analytical lens. For Dugin, the liberal international order was never truly universal. It was “a project of ideological colonization,” one that sought to erase civilizational difference under the pretext of norms, markets, and democracy.

 “Liberalism,” he writes, “destroys all forms of collective identity—religion, nation, family, and even gender—and replaces them with the figure of the isolated individual as the sole political actor.” What Trump signaled was the collapse of faith in this universalizing project—not only among its critics abroad, but increasingly among its creators. 

 Seen through this lens, Trump’s foreign policy was not an aberration but a symptom. The U.S. no longer had the means—or the will—to sustain the burden of global empire. What emerged in its place was a new kind of imperial retrenchment: inward-looking, ethnonationalist, protectionist, and hostile to multilateral constraint. It is not simply that the U.S. abandoned multilateralism; it is that multilateralism, as previously conceived, had outlived its usefulness as an instrument of empire. 

 Thus, the collapse of the liberal order should not be read as a vacuum to be mourned, but as an opening in which other political imaginaries—rooted in difference, autonomy, and genuine pluralism—might take root. Whether this leads to a more just world or merely new forms of domination remains an open question.

The Rise of BRICS and the Multipolar Horizon

Into the vacuum left by the decaying liberal international order steps the BRICS bloc, a coalition that has evolved from a loose acronym into a geopolitical force with growing gravitational pull. With the admission of Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Indonesia, and the United Arab Emirates as of January 2025, BRICS now comprises ten members, collectively representing over 40% of the global population and nearly 28% of global GDP. Its expansion has transformed it from a rhetorical gesture of Southern solidarity into a tangible platform of strategic realignment.

Dozens of countries—including Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and Malaysia—have either applied or expressed interest in joining. This reflects, as Walden Bello argues, a deepening realization across the Global South that “the scale is steadily tipping against the West, which has grown increasingly defensive, grouchy, and insecure.” The desire for alternatives—financial, technological, diplomatic—is not only about power-balancing; it is about escaping the suffocating grip of the Washington Consensus and the conditionalities that have historically tethered development to neoliberal orthodoxy.

The institutions spawned by BRICS—the New Development Bank (NDB) and the Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA)—remain modest in scale when compared to their Bretton Woods counterparts. As of 2021, the NDB’s total lending stood at just under $30 billion, a fraction of the World Bank’s activity. And yet, their symbolic weight exceeds their financial footprint. They signal a shift in imagination: that development finance can be decoupled from Western tutelage, that alternatives to dollar hegemony and IMF austerity are not only conceivable but already underway.

China, in particular, has emerged as a development financier of formidable capacity. As Kevin Gallagher notes, Beijing now provides more infrastructure financing to the Global South than all Western-backed institutions combined. Unlike the IMF, whose assistance often comes bound to harsh structural adjustment programs, Chinese loans are typically free of overt political conditionality—though not of strategic calculus.

Yet the BRICS bloc is no utopia. Bello cautions against triumphalist narratives: “Are the key actors in the BRICS going to be open to sharing decision-making power over their resources?” This is no small question. Internally, the bloc is riven by contradictions—economic, ideological, and civilizational. China’s centralized state capitalism sits uncomfortably beside India’s populist Hindu nationalism. Brazil and South Africa wrestle with extreme inequality and governance crises. Russia remains a pariah to the West, even as it positions itself as a Eurasian anchor of anti-Western multipolarism.

To understand the deeper significance of BRICS, one must look beyond GDP aggregates and investment flows to the civilizational dimension—a point emphasized by Russian political theorist Alexander Dugin, whose writings on multipolarity have gained traction among various ideological camps worldwide. For Dugin, multipolarity is not merely the redistribution of geopolitical power; it is the rejection of the unipolar, liberal-capitalist model as the sole template for civilization. As he writes:
“Multipolarity means that different civilizations and peoples have the right to follow their own paths… It affirms the plurality of truths, histories, and destinies.”

In Dugin’s formulation, BRICS and other emergent blocs do not simply challenge Western hegemony—they reassert the legitimacy of cultural, historical, and political pluralism. This stands in stark contrast to the liberal internationalist ethos, which has sought to universalize a narrow set of values—free markets, liberal democracy, human rights—often backed by coercive enforcement.

But Dugin also issues a warning: 

“Multipolarity does not mean peace; it means pluralism. And pluralism is full of tensions.” 

A truly multipolar order is inherently unstable, for it allows for contradictions, rival claims to legitimacy, and divergent civilizational logics. As such, BRICS cannot be expected to function like a monolithic bloc with a coherent ideology. Its unity is not in doctrinal alignment but in shared resistance to Western dominance, and in the recognition that development and sovereignty can take different forms in different contexts.

This civilizational multiplicity raises uncomfortable questions. Can a bloc that includes both democratic and authoritarian regimes produce a model of development that is participatory, equitable, and sustainable? Can it avoid the temptations of replication—of becoming merely a “new center” dominating new peripheries? Already, China’s Belt and Road Initiative has been critiqued for generating local dispossession, ecological degradation, and elite capture. India’s expansionist development model often replicates similar patterns, particularly in its treatment of indigenous lands and labor.

Thus, BRICS is best understood not as a cohesive alternative, but as a field of struggle—a contradictory space where the seeds of a post-Western future are being planted, but not yet cultivated. Bello reminds us that “democratic governance at the global level cannot be delinked from democratic governance at the local level.” Without grassroots participation and mechanisms for accountability, BRICS could merely reproduce the structural inequalities it claims to resist.

The multipolar horizon, then, is not a destination, but a terrain—contested, unstable, and full of potential. Whether it becomes a foundation for global justice or simply a new arena for imperial competition remains to be seen.

Revisiting Bandung, Recalling Lenin

The year 2025 marks the 70th anniversary of the Bandung Conference, a landmark in postcolonial internationalism. In 1955, leaders from newly decolonized Asian and African nations gathered not simply to reject Western imperialism, but to imagine a third way—a sovereign path unaligned with either the capitalist West or the Soviet East. Bandung was more than diplomatic choreography; it was a moral-political declaration of independence, rooted in the collective aspirations of peoples who had endured centuries of colonial exploitation.

Central to the Bandung spirit was the affirmation of dignity, self-determination, and non-interference. The first of its ten principles—“respect for fundamental human rights”—placed human dignity above Cold War alignments. But seventy years on, that principle lies in ruins. As Walden Bello points out, many of today’s BRICS states—some of which were key movers at Bandung—are themselves entangled in massive human rights violations. India, once championed by Nehru as a voice of secular democracy, is now governed by a Hindu nationalist regime that treats Muslim citizens with systemic hostility. China, led by a party claiming anti-imperialist lineage, pursues forced assimilation and surveillance of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Egypt and Myanmar, both present at Bandung, are ruled by repressive military regimes.

This grim landscape raises an uncomfortable question: What happens when the heirs of anti-colonial movements become agents of new forms of domination? As Dugin’s notion of multipolarity gains currency, one must ask—does a world of many poles offer freedom, or simply many empires?

It is here that Lenin’s critique of imperialism becomes crucial. In Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, he describes imperialism not merely as conquest, but as the structural expression of late capitalism—the domination of monopolies, the merging of banking and industrial capital, and the export of capital to exploit foreign labor and resources:

 “Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance… and in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun.”

Lenin’s framework suggests that imperialism is not abolished by changing flags; it is abolished only by disrupting the logic of accumulation that underpins it. In this light, a BRICS-led world that remains embedded in capitalist extraction, elite control, and ecological degradation cannot be considered post-imperial—it is imperialism in a new dialect.

This contradiction lies at the heart of the multipolar discourse. Is multipolarity a step toward emancipation, or a reshuffling of global hierarchy? In theory, a multipolar world affirms plurality, sovereignty, and the right of different civilizations to pursue their own developmental trajectories. But in practice, many BRICS states reproduce the same patterns of internal exclusion and external exploitation long associated with Western dominance. Large-scale infrastructure projects, often financed by Chinese or Gulf capital, frequently displace indigenous communities, pollute ecosystems, and strengthen authoritarian governance under the guise of development.

These tensions were already visible at Bandung. The conference brought together a heterogenous group—liberal democracies, monarchies, military-led states—united more by shared opposition to colonialism than by a shared vision for justice. In this sense, Bandung was always a project of contradiction, a coalition held together by negative unity rather than positive consensus. What is different today is that these contradictions have deepened, as neoliberal globalization has entrenched elite rule, expanded class polarizations, and narrowed the space for genuine democratic participation in the Global South.

Antonio Gramsci’s notion of passive revolution helps explain why radical decolonial promises are often absorbed and neutralized by capitalist structures. Passive revolution is the process through which elite transformations appear revolutionary, but actually preserve the underlying structures of domination. Gramsci writes that “the old is dying and the new cannot be born,” and in this interregnum, morbid symptoms appear—from technocratic authoritarianism to extractive populism.

What we are witnessing in much of the BRICS world is not revolutionary rupture, but passive adaptation: elites deploying the language of anti-colonialism and sovereignty to mask extractivist agendas, nationalist violence, and elite capture. China’s Belt and Road Initiative, India’s megaprojects, Brazil’s agribusiness expansion—these are not alternatives to imperialism, but its regional mutations.

Thus, to recall Bandung today is not to romanticize it, but to reclaim its radical horizon: a world order rooted in solidarity, self-determination, and material justice. That vision cannot be realized through diplomacy alone. It must be grounded in class struggle, in the rights of indigenous peoples, peasants, workers, and women to control their lands, bodies, and labor. It requires, as Lenin insisted, the rupture of the structures that enable imperialism—not simply their rebranding.

And so, the task before the Global South is not merely to replace one multilateral system with another, but to transform the very foundations of how global power, production, and legitimacy are organized. Without that transformation, multipolarity risks becoming a mirage: a new map drawn by old hands.

Capitalism Without a Compass

A shared characteristic of both the liberal international order and its emergent challengers is their deep and continued entrenchment in global capitalism. The past forty years of neoliberal globalization have blurred the ideological boundaries that once seemed to separate capitalist, socialist, and developmental regimes. Whether one speaks of the United States, the European Union, China, India, Brazil, or South Africa, the logic remains broadly the same: market expansion, capital accumulation, and extractive growth. As Walden Bello writes,
“Capitalism continues to both penetrate the farthest reaches of the globe and deepen its entrenchment in areas it has subjugated. Whether market-driven, developmental, or state capitalist, the same dynamics of surplus extraction, with massive planetary externalities, cut across these variants of capitalism.”

The illusion that multipolarity alone can transform the system is shattered when one observes that the structural conditions of exploitation remain intact, simply relabeled or redistributed. The Belt and Road Initiative may differ from World Bank lending in form, but it often replicates the same extraction, dispossession, and elite alignment. India’s digital infrastructure push, framed as modernization, similarly concentrates wealth and facilitates surveillance, while marginalizing informal workers and rural communities. These examples reflect what David Harvey has called “accumulation by dispossession”—the process by which land, labor, and commons are commodified in new and ever more sophisticated ways.

Meanwhile, the defenders of neoliberal capitalism maintain that markets, deregulation, and globalization are the best tools for lifting populations out of poverty and advancing human development. Jagdish Bhagwati, a prominent free trade economist, argues that “globalization is not the cause of poverty; it is the only cure,” suggesting that open markets empower developing nations by increasing competitiveness and attracting investment. Similarly, Lawrence Summers, former U.S. Treasury Secretary and World Bank Chief Economist, once famously said,
“Spread the truth—the laws of economics are like the laws of engineering. One set of laws works everywhere.”

For them, capitalism is not only efficient—it is inevitable. They often cite the reduction in global extreme poverty, driven by growth in China and India, as evidence that capitalism works when unshackled. But this narrative obscures the underlying costs: mass ecological degradation, precarious labor conditions, urban slums, and deepening inequality. The system delivers growth, but often without justice, without stability, and without democratic accountability.

The critics of neoliberal capitalism offer a starkly different view. Naomi Klein, writing in The Shock Doctrine, describes neoliberalism as “disaster capitalism”—a system that exploits crises to push through unpopular reforms that benefit elites. She warns that what is celebrated as efficiency is often predation. Ha-Joon Chang, a heterodox economist from South Korea, argues that neoliberalism has “kicked away the ladder” of development by enforcing policies on the Global South that the West never applied to itself during its own industrial rise. He writes,
“What rich countries tell developing ones to do and what they actually did to become rich are very different things.”

Likewise, Thomas Piketty, in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, documents how capitalism naturally produces inequality unless actively curbed by redistributive measures. “R>G”—the return on capital exceeding the rate of economic growth—is not an exception, but a rule that ensures wealth concentrates in the hands of those who already own it. In his view, unless we radically rethink the structure of ownership, tax, and labor, the 21st century will look more like the 19th—a world of rentiers and permanent class divides.

Even within the Global South, many progressive scholars and activists warn that capitalism without sovereignty—and increasingly, capitalism without direction—is an engine of internal colonialism. The wealth extracted in the name of “national development” often never reaches the majority. As Bello notes, “the masses… are economically disenfranchised, and in liberal democracies, their participation in democracy is often limited to casting votes in periodic, often meaningless, electoral exercises.”

This brings us to the central contradiction of our time: capitalism as both the engine of development and the architect of disaster. The climate crisis, mass displacement, urban poverty, rising authoritarianism—these are not external to the system, they are its logical consequences. As Friedrich Hayek, one of neoliberalism’s founding figures, famously warned (unintentionally prophetically):
“We shall never prevent the abuse of power if we are not prepared to limit power in the first place.”

Hayek meant the state. But today, that warning applies equally to the unchecked power of capital, which increasingly dominates not only the economy, but politics, society, and even nature.

Thus, the greatest obstacle to a just global order may not be the West or the East—it may be capitalism itself. A world of many centers, without an alternative vision of economic justice, will simply replicate the same center-periphery dynamics internally: workers and peasants at the base, elites at the helm, and the planet as collateral. Multipolarity without post-capitalism is not liberation; it is capitalism without a compass—directionless, extractive, and dangerously unsustainable.

Conclusion: Monsters at the Threshold

Antonio Gramsci’s oft-quoted insight feels more prophetic than ever: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” The unraveling of the liberal international order does not usher in a period of harmony. Rather, it exposes us to an interregnum filled with volatility, opportunism, and ideological realignment. Multipolarity is not a safe harbor—it is a storm-tossed sea of competing sovereignties, corporate dominions, resurgent empires, and fractured truths. The danger is not disorder alone, but co-optation: the capture of decolonial energies by new authoritarian regimes, the absorption of democratic yearnings into technocratic development models, the branding of imperialism in civilizational or nationalist garb.

Dugin warns that the transition from a unipolar to a multipolar world will not be peaceful or seamless:
“Multipolarity is not the end of history; it is the beginning of struggle. Between civilizations, between values, between meanings. It is a world of many truths, not one.”

But this relativism, while emancipatory for some, risks legitimizing illiberal orders and ethnonationalist visions that weaponize culture against universal rights. What emerges, then, is a paradox: in the name of diversity, new hegemonies form—ones that speak of tradition while crushing dissent, that promise sovereignty while excluding the subaltern, that invoke civilization while devouring the commons.

Karl Marx warned of such cyclical illusions in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, noting that history repeats itself “first as tragedy, then as farce.” The tragedy of the 20th century was empire cloaked in liberal internationalism. The farce may be a world where multipolar capitalism disguises itself as liberation—where China’s tech-authoritarianism, India’s caste-coded capitalism, and Russia’s neo-imperial geopolitics stand in for post-colonial justice. What Marx called the “fetishism of commodities”—our mistaken belief that relations between people are relations between things—now finds its geopolitical counterpart: the fetishism of power blocs, where emancipation is projected onto states rather than built from below.

It is here that Lenin’s clarity cuts through:
“We must dream! But we must also critically examine our dreams, confront them with the facts of reality, and test them in practice.”

Dreaming of a just multipolar order is not naïve. What is naïve is to believe that it will arise automatically through shifts in global GDP or membership in new international clubs. The dream of a liberated future must be tempered by the discipline of struggle—a struggle rooted not in the summits of state power or the corridors of finance, but in grassroots mobilization, democratic insurgency, and transnational solidarity.

The real terrain of contestation, then, is not Belem or Sevilla, not BRICS or the IMF, but the fields and forests where land defenders resist extractivism; the factories where precarious workers demand dignity; the flood zones and drought belts where climate justice becomes a matter of survival. These are the frontlines where capitalism meets its ecological, moral, and political limits—and where new imaginaries are being born, often in fragments, but nonetheless real.

If multipolarity is to mean anything beyond the redistribution of imperial functions, it must be tied to a transformative vision: one that links sovereignty to justice, pluralism to equity, decolonization to democracy. This requires the active construction of a radical internationalism—a politics that is not about siding with powers, but empowering the powerless; not about naming new centers, but dismantling the logic of the center-periphery divide altogether.

To quote Dugin once more, with caution:
“In multipolarity, we are not seeking stability—we are seeking meaning. The world must rediscover meaning through difference.”

But meaning without justice is merely myth. And difference without equality is hierarchy by another name.

Multipolarity is not a destination. It is a terrain. A battlefield between the ghosts of empire and the seeds of liberation. As the world shifts into this new configuration, one question remains: Will this be a reorganization of global power, or a reimagining of global freedom?