As the Cold War began to wane, multipolarism became a rallying cry for everyone sick and tired of superpower politics, nuclear standoffs, and the banal bipolarism of Soviet misinformation and American propaganda.
This “rise of the rest” was prefigured in the Non-Aligned Movement that began in 1961, the New International Economic Order that the United Nations launched in the 1970s, the consolidation of an economically powerful East Asia and a single European market in the 1980s, and the south-south cooperation that emerged in the 1990s. By the early 2000s, after a couple of papers by Morgan Stanley, of all places, the BRICS bloc of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa was christened and then institutionalized.
In 2008, Fareed Zakaria published The Post-American World, which was less an epitaph for U.S. hegemony than a paean to all the other rising powers that were increasingly shaping geopolitics. It was hard to refute his central thesis. The bipolar world had vanished; the unipolar world of American supremacy was no longer tenable; the multipolar world was emerging like a kind of phoenix, even though the old world had not yet been reduced to ash and the new bird was still in its infancy.
Then something strange …read more
Source:: Institute for Policy Studies
