This is global south time

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When stories of the war in Ukraine are being written, it seems a safe bet that the African mediation mission announced by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa will have a hard time making a footnote. Would-be mediators are two cents these days, and South Africa has marked its letter as too welcoming to Moscow to be a credible interlocutor with Ukraine anyway.

But when writing the stories of the rise of the post-unipolar world, Africa’s quixotic mediators may well deserve a mention. The idea of ​​six African heads of state crossing the front lines of a European war is not only a revealing counterpoint to all those Western interventions in Africa over the years, but also underscores the accelerated assertiveness of the countries of the “south”. global”. – and his feeling that his time may really have come at last.

This has been visible in various settings since the old globalized order began to fragment after the 2008 financial crisis. But the war in Ukraine has accelerated it.

Many non-Western nations have watched the West’s unconditional support for Ukraine and seen duplicitous powers once again prioritizing their own interests and concerns over big global issues like health and climate change. They also see two major opportunities: pitting the US and China against each other and, as they see it, a long overdue rewriting of the post-1945 world order.

As with all potential revolutionary grand coalitions, this renewed “non-aligned movement” is a group of very different and often competing interests; and some can hardly claim to be neutral. The Brics summit in Durban in August will be a cacophonous showcase of these contradictions. The group is made up of two autocracies, Russia and China, two large democracies, Brazil and India (the latter very concerned about the rise of China), and the host and minor relative, South Africa. Now more than a dozen other countries are interested in joining, including Iran.

Not only does this threaten to unleash the world’s most stunned acronym, but the risk, particularly for India and Brazil, is that the Brics will increasingly lean towards becoming a China club rather than a non-aligned forum of economies in development.

But even so there are clear common interests and objectives: a restructuring of the UN Security Council so that it represents the world as it is today; a rethinking of the Bretton Woods institutions; a tilt towards the dollar as the global reserve currency; a setback in the US-led system of economic sanctions; and more.

Not all of these goals may be achievable, but they are far more precise than the confusing goals of the original nonaligned movement at its first meeting in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955. Back then, members represented a minuscule part of the global economy. ; not so today.

“It was a talking point then,” says Michael Power, who for 30 years has studied the rise of the global south, most recently as a Cape Town-based strategist for asset manager Ninety One. “But now they are talking about whether they should start trading with each other with local currencies.”

So what should the West do? Lead by example, finally commit to global order reforms, and choose your words more carefully. Simple advice for anyone drafting communiqués at the end of this weekend’s G7 summit: Avoid the phrases like “indifferent” and “geopolitical swing states” currently circulating in Washington. The swing state metaphor, which implies “we’ll focus on you once every four years,” perpetuates the sense of condescending, if not parochial, imperial power.

“We should talk about a rules-based international system, not the rules-based system,” says a senior Western diplomat. “And when we talk about war it should not be about European peace but about the kind of world we want to live in.”

More specifically, the Biden administration has been building bespoke regional alliances, from I2U2 (deviate as a Bono-inspired grouping would be, this is India, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and the US), to the Security Quad. from Asia-Pacific from India, Australia, Japan and the US.

However, China is also actively gathering. This week, Xi Jinping hosted a summit of countries in Central Asia, Russia’s backyard, reinforcing historian Serhii Plokhy’s thesis that, far from expanding Moscow’s global weight, the war in Ukraine has accelerated a possible subservience to Beijing. .

Of course, the new world orders are easier to declare than to carry out. In 1991 George HW Bush spoke of one. His words rang hollow a year later: Bosnia was on fire. And some will find it difficult to take their new course. The awkwardness of South Africa pas de deux with Russia is an object lesson in how not to play the non-aligned game. It is fortunate that the Biden administration does not seem inclined to penalize him for his erratic.

But India, Indonesia and others are playing quite well. When the war in Ukraine ends, it will be in the context of a world order more subtle than that of February 2022. It will be more complex and probably more dangerous; but for some non-aligned countries it will have more opportunities. And it’s here to stay.

alec.russell@ft.com