Ongoing revolution in the global order

In Sri Lanka we might be bold enough to position ourselves at the leading edge of thinking around remaking the global order on more just and equal principles

Last year I wrote a column in this paper on the contortion of Western intellectuals who were attempting to distinguish between a Euro-American alliance based on a ‘rules-based order’ and one predicated on an ambiguous notion of the ‘free world’ (“The West and the Rest: Is There Another Way of Mapping the Global Divide?”, 19 June 2024). Implicitly acknowledging the West’s moral hypocrisy on issues like Gaza, Gideon Rachman, a columnist for the UK Financial Times, advocated for the concept of the free world. 

Rachman implied that this rhetorical device could allow the West to rationalise policies like alliances with authoritarian regimes that would otherwise imply a double standard. Since then, Donald Trump has returned to office in the US. In addition to sparking a constitutional crisis at home, he is upending relations abroad. After the Trump regime’s recent remarks on Ukraine, the transatlantic alliance that was consolidated after World War II is falling apart. The US and Europe are increasingly at odds.

In the rush, France’s Foreign Minister recently made comments that could be seen as an opening appeal to the global South: please do not think in terms of North or South, but those who accept a rules-based order. Of course, the irony is not lost on the emerging powers such as South Africa that are participating in the G20 forum, to which the French Minister’s comments were directed. Nevertheless, the French Foreign Minister’s remarks point to a symptomatic issue that remains unresolved: if US hegemony can no longer guarantee order of any kind, either one based on rules, even if selectively applied, or the mythical notion of the free world, then what can replace it? The reality is that there is no easy alternative. Instead, this moment in world history is likely to be equivalent in its consequences to the period between the World Wars. There will be continuing upheaval until a new bloc of States, aligned in their priorities, come together to establish a new hegemony. 

For those who actively celebrate the decimation of the US’s moral and ideological authority, it is easy to see it being replaced by a ‘multipolar’ world order. But the reality is that this perception erases the much stronger likelihood that States will continue to be shaped by domestic social and class conflicts, which drive them towards confrontation. We are entering a period of dramatic change until new circumstances are established under which global capitalism can reproduce itself in a more sustainable way. Given the overwhelming ideological weakness of the Left, however, we need not try and convince ourselves that the resolution of the conflict will lead, for example, to the triumph of communism. Instead, the more relevant question for small Southern countries like Sri Lanka remains, what role do they see themselves as having in the making of a new order? To what extent will it reflect the interests and priorities of their own populations?

A genealogy of world peace and its contradictions

Historically, thinking about global order has largely drawn from two competing strands of ideology: liberalism and Marxism. In the case of liberalism, the belief—captured most famously in 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s work, “Perpetual Peace”—is that democracies are more likely to cooperate with each other. This fact leads to the possibility of world peace. Classical Marxists, on the other hand, viewed conflict within States as inevitable. But they saw an opening for the proletariat. By confronting the ruling class in their own countries, as Marx and Engels put it in the ‘Communist Manifesto’, the working classes would eventually be able to establish a different kind of global federation that transcends capitalism. 

Of course, the reality is that the Marxist project proved much harder to execute. The last serious attempt was in the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution. In a fleeting moment, a subsequent revolution in Germany that occurred after the country’s defeat in World War I seemed like it could create a revolutionary nexus in Europe with far-reaching implications.

Instead, the German Revolution was also defeated. The leading lights of revolutionary Marxism in the country, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, were killed by the paramilitary precursors to the Nazis. With the wipeout came the death-knell of any real attempt to pursue the kind of ‘permanent revolution’ that canonical Marxist thinkers like Leon Trotsky envisioned. This resolution undermines the ‘anti-totalitarian’ rhetoric after World War II that denounced the Soviet Union’s expansionist ambitions. In fact, the Soviet Union eventually played the role of a conservatising force. Where possible, the Soviet Union attempted to restrain its junior partners in the global South. If at all, it drew them into its fold for the narrower geopolitical goal of ensuring its own security. 

In this sense, Stalin—far from being the Russian Napoleon aiming to spread communism around the world through military force—anticipated the détente of great powers. Returning to the interwar period, the rise of fascism in Central Europe after the defeat of the German Revolution provoked liberalism and drove it to new heights. Liberal democracies like the US and UK responded with their own social democratic alternatives to the Great Depression. 

After the triumph of the Allies against the Axis, the Cold War between former allies began. The West led by the US threw itself into the task of suppressing revolutions in the global South, which were often driven by the combined principles of nationalism and communism. Despite the strategic victory of Vietnam against the US, the overwhelming counterrevolution gained force. It was eventually much more effective in establishing itself through comprador regimes that accepted ‘structural adjustment’ under the direction of the Bretton Woods institutions. The US achieved its ultimate victory with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. But its absolute success proved to be fatal. 

As sociologists Beverly Silver and Giovanni Arrighi pointed out, the diverse forms of resistance that could act as a check on the excessive accumulation of wealth and power were subdued, if not eliminated. Of course, Ronald Reagan had begun to make the US into a new Babylon even before the Cold War ended. But the dissolution of the Soviet Union accelerated the destruction of any countervailing force that could contain the most rapacious tendencies of neoliberal globalisation.

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If the Marxist vision for world peace was defeated by the US-led West, liberalism was unmade from within its own polities. Key moments include the War on Terror, in which ‘humanitarian intervention’ morphed into outright occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Global Financial Crisis, which demonstrated the shaky foundations of the economic order. But what proved fatal perhaps was how these trends were mediated and reflected by social and political structures. The rise of social media and its algorithmic domination of the public’s attention has been a crucial part of the explanation for Trump’s rise. But in the case of the US, it is also clear that its political institutions became increasingly sclerotic and incapable of reforming themselves. The Supreme Court decision on Citizens United allowed unchecked spending on political campaigns through ‘Super PACs’ (Political Action Committees). It paved the way for Elon Musk to help buy the US elections in 2024.

Global disorder

In this context, it is easy to become cynical. ‘Cargo cult communism’—to use a social media coinage, which highlights the reductive nature of myth in the absence of an actual movement—takes any sign of breakdown as further evidence that a multipolar order is at hand. But as the tentative steps towards a US/Russia deal to carve up Ukraine show, Far-Right regimes are not more likely to negotiate compromises because they actively embrace the principle of ‘non-interference’. Rather, it is because they must first suppress domestic resistance before confronting each other. The Nazi-Soviet treaty of non-aggression, colloquially known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact would be the clearest historical analogy, though we should not equate the ontologically distinct order of Nazi evil with Stalinism.

In our own times, the storm clouds gathering through the build up of weapons manufacturing do not anticipate world peace.

In this period of intensifying global disorder, what is the alternative? Frustration with Trump is leading to a renaissance of republican nationalisms in North America. There is talk of the possibility of forming a new alliance of liberal democratic regimes that can confront US, Russian, and Chinese authoritarianism. Strange bedfellows, like the pact between the US, UK, and Soviet Union against Nazi Germany are indeed possible. But any attempt to envision a new beginning for world peace after the stunning pivots of the Trump regime in its fast-moving ‘Pluviôse’—to borrow the term from the French revolutionary calendar—requires a firmer grasp of principles. If the US does indeed undergo a successful Reconstruction after Trump, then maybe it could eventually participate in a reconfigured bloc of republics. 

In the meantime, however, the world system is being run without a hegemon, as Robin Harding put it in his recent piece for the UK Financial Times, “Who Will Now Stabilise the World Economy?” In that column, Harding reflects on the lesson from Charles Kindelberger, the economic historian who diagnosed the absence of a global hegemon as a key cause of the Great Depression.

Accordingly, in this moment of unravelling, liberalism alone is not strong enough to act as a countermovement. Instead, we need a much broader, more capacious vision of the manifold trends of resistance across polities of wildly different character. They may coalesce in opposition to both the extreme accumulation of wealth and power and the aggressive, confrontational dynamics between great powers that such a tendency provokes. That horizon may be a lofty goal for now. But the spirit of the idea can inspire a widespread network of intellectuals, ideologues, policy makers, and political partisans to hammer out a new framework that can connect seemingly disconnected places and events. The decade and a half of mass protest since the Global Financial Crisis may not have materialised in any successful long-term party building. Nevertheless, the Trump shock to the global order anticipates a renewed round of thinking in anticipation of the likely resistance that will emerge.

What can Sri Lanka contribute to a just and equal global order?

Meanwhile, in Sri Lanka we might be bold enough to position ourselves at the leading edge of thinking around remaking the global order on more just and equal principles. The goal means working towards a new vision of world peace. Or, in our understanding of its political economy, imposing constraints on the dynamics of capital accumulation, which otherwise put capital in tension with the logic of State power, as Arrighi showed in his masterpiece ‘The Long Twentieth Century’. Even in this period of tremendous global upheaval, Sri Lanka cannot execute a successful revolution in which great powers and big capital dominate the world. But in meeting the needs of its people through principles such as self-sufficiency, it might be able to demonstrate some of the implicit possibilities. 

That includes connecting greater democratic participation with a transformation of social relations, including through land reform and the expansion of cooperatives. Sri Lanka has yet to exit the IMF trap. Still, with the unravelling of the global order, it is extremely likely the choice will be made for the country. 

The question is whether far-sighted political forces can navigate the resulting disruption to push for a reorganisation of the relationship between State and society. That means one based on principles of redistribution, cooperation, and ultimately a pluralistic understanding of social existence. With the extent of the global upheaval unfolding, it may seem foolhardy to grant Sri Lanka this much scope for its potential contribution to the ideological work that must be done. 

But there is a gaping void in terms of thinking through new values of universalism and international engagement. Even before stepping foot into the cutthroat world of market competition and enterprise, perhaps Sri Lanka can seize first movers’ advantage in helping construct a new political universalism. It might to do so by reflecting more deeply on the needs of its working people in this moment of crisis.