Glimpses of the Multipolar World (BRICS Summit edition), 25 August 2023
BRICS. No hegemon? Pluralism. Explorers. Alien Son. Unageing Intellect. Yeats.
Each week in my newsletter, I offer seven glimpses of world history in the multipolar world. The BRICS Summit made this week an occasion for the whole world to reflect on the plurality of the multipolar world. This week I share glimpses of:
The Big Story. BRICS and the Johannesburg declaration.
Governing the Multipolar World. A world without one hegemon?
Using History Mindfully. Imagining plural identities with history
Fragments of the Burning Archive. Explorers, Tupaia’s Chart and Capt Cook
What surprised me most. Alien Son.
Gratitudes and Works-in-Progress. Nobel Prizes and monuments of unageing intellect.
Reading and Closing Verse. W.B. Yeats Sailing to Byzantium
1. The Big Story: BRICS and the Johannesburg declaration
No doubt the big story of the multipolar world this week was the BRICS summit in Johannesburg. It even managed to feature the Indian space mission landing on the moon Narendra Modi was gracious enough to declare this an achievement of the plural world.
The agreed decisions of the BRICS Summit are set out in the Johannesburg Declaration. You can also watch the press conference in which all the leaders spoke, and perhaps make your own observations about the respectful ways in which they spoke with each other.
The preamble of the Johannesburg Declaration states the principles of the institutions of a plural world order. It announces a new stage of maturity for this now central institution.
We further commit ourselves to strengthening the framework of mutually beneficial BRICS cooperation under the three pillars of political and security, economic and financial, and cultural and people-to-people cooperation and to enhancing our strategic partnership for the benefit of our people through the promotion of peace, a more representative, fairer international order, a reinvigorated and reformed multilateral system, sustainable development and inclusive growth.
This preamble does not call for BRICS or any one country of BRICS to be the new world leader. It calls instead for new ways of peaceful development for the world that genuinely enable all the world to flourish, not just the West, or the golden billion, as Vladimir Putin calls them.
It is a reasoned moral challenge to the leaders of the West. So far, some Western leaders, commentators and media talking heads have responded with some pettiness, as evidenced by the disinformation campaign about divisions within the BRICS in the lead-up to the summit. It would be a grave error to demonise BRICS, especially now that it is expanding to BRICS-11 and soon more. There is a good discussion of this on the recent Multipolarity podcast.
The Declaration contains these sections that set out the agreements:
Preamble (paras 1-3), with the principles quoted above
Partnership for Inclusive Multilateralism (paras 3-10), with criticism of “unilateral coercive measures incompatible with the principles of the Charter of the UN” and a focus on reform of the international organisations including the UN, WTO and IMF
Fostering an Environment for Peace and Development (paras 11-25), that leads to peaceful resolution of differences and disputes through dialogue and inclusive consultations, and gives more weight to current conflicts in Africa, the Middle East, and Haiti, and more importance to the role of women and prevention of nuclear war, rather than the G7’s focus on Ukraine and its model of democracy.
Partnership for Mutually Accelerated Growth (paras 26-51), which discusses multilateral economic cooperation and has decisions on local currencies, payment instruments and platforms, and the National Development Bank
Partnership for Sustainable Development (paras 52-74) with declarations on sustainable development goals, climate change, health care, pandemic prevention, preparedness and response, education and skills, science and technology and energy
Deepening People-to-People Exchanges (para 75-86) with initiatives to deepen people-people exchanges in business, media, culture, education, sports (including the BRICS Games in October 2023), arts, youth, civil society and academic exchanges
Institutional Development (paras 87-94), with decisions on BRICS membership
It is an elegantly constructed declaration. Its rhetoric is of pluralism, generosity between countries with different values, and peaceful development that benefits the whole world, especially the Global South, which countries have suffered from decisions by the West. This rhetoric is far more appealing than the harsh tones of the NATO Vilnius Summit declaration: shrill militarism, paranoid defence of unique democratic traditions, and denunciation of rivals as uncivilised.
The two large decisions of consequence for the international order that were widely speculated on before the summit, and led some to anticipate an historic turning point, were BRICS expansion and ‘dedollarization’. On both issues the declaration has revealed a patient method, rather than publicity driven drama. This patient method demands more respect from Western leaders, commentators and journalists, who turn international diplomacy and world history too often into panel show pantomime.
On BRICS expansion, six countries will become full members in January 2024. These countries are: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. These states may now be considered middle powers, and will participate in next year’s BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia. Moreover, there is a set of rules, processes and arrangements to agree on expansion of the membership. South African leader and chair of the Summit, Cyril Ramaphosa, emphasised in the press conference that these rules and processes will support a further phase of expansion, perhaps even to be ratified at the 2024 Summit. Leaders also tasked Foreign Ministers to develop a BRICS Partners program By 2025, then, we might project that BRICS may well represent more than 40 per cent of the world economy, and over half of the world’s population.
On ‘dedollarisation’, leaders have strengthened the role of the New Development Bank and the BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement. Critically and patiently, Leaders tasked Finance Ministers and Central Bankers to develop a set of proposals by next year’s summit. These proposals will relate to national currencies, payment systems and platforms. In other words, next year the fates of the ‘petrodollar’ and the Western crutch of economic sanctions through the financial system will be decided by a summit comprising major economies subjected to sanctions, and these OPEC, oil-producing powers: Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. As former Prime Minister Paul Keating once said to an American trained free-marketeer Opposition Leader, “I am going to do you slowly, brother.”
This patient method will broaden the networks governed by BRICS sustainably. The careful husbandry of the energy of these new networks will change world history. The dream of a homogenised world brought together under the monotheistic leadership of the USA, and its liberal rules-based order, has been exposed as a misunderstanding of the history of globalisation. As John Darwin wrote in the conclusion of After Tamerlane: the Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000 (2007)
“The magnetic force of the global economy has been too erratic thus far, and too unevenly felt, to impose the cooperative behaviour and cultural fusion to which theorists of free trade have often looked forward. What we call globalisation today might be candidly seen as flowing from a set of recent agreements, some tacit, some formal, between the four great economic ‘empires’ of the contemporary world: America, Europe, Japan and China.” (p. 505)
But the agreements have broken down, and the set of great states has changed. A new plural, diverse world order is taking shape. BRICS Johannesburg is not a turning point but a tolling of the bell of all those bad histories of the West and the disastrous ‘grand strategies’ of the failing American elites.
2. Governing the unruly multipolar world: A world without one hegemon?
The tolling of the bell for the American dream of a single world order, made in its own image, however does not mean the story of an expanding BRICS is the rise of a new hegemon. The multipolar world is becoming less unruly, and more plural.
If we take BRICS at their word, they do not want to be a global hegemon. There is no real reason to doubt this. Their leaders have frequently commented on the tragedy of the American century, and the unique historical circumstances that drove an unusual imperial predominance, and an unhealthy ideology of exceptionalism. Critically, the BRICS declaration states they do not want to replace collective multilateral institutions. They want to operate within the framework of existing multilateral institutions. Understanding this fundamental element of strategy offers a fresh perspective on what the BRICS countries need to achieve. They do not need to become the rulers of the world. They need to convince the West that it can live peacefully in a world without a single hegemon. They need to bring the west out of the shadow of Tamerlane
If there is one continuity that we should be able to glean from a long view of the past, it is Eurasia’s resistance to a uniform system, a single great ruler, or one set of rules. In that sense, we still live in Tamerlane’s shadow - or perhaps more precisely, in the shadow of his failure.” (John Darwin, After Tamerlane, pp. 505-506)
The US strategists made a disastrous miscalculation about world history after 1989. The USA declared independence from the international system in the early 1990s. The international rules based, Hollywood-proclaimed international order was born, and was born in war. Its strategy of a flat world was always a bit of a stretch, and its claim to dominate the world through a computer screen in the White House Situation was always a bit of a bluff. Perhaps, some of the strategists, like Wolfowitz, Cheney and the bitter ageing Brzezinski, sensed that the world would wake up to the illusion. They said, as reported by former US generals, that they had to strike with urgency into Eurasia, and get rid of all the ‘rogue states’ in the 1990s who might one day resist. They believed they had a small window of five years in which they could do whatever they wanted. The window was made shorter by disastrous miscalculations in Iraq, Afghanistan and the eastward expansion of NATO.
The BRICS nations do not suffer the same illusion of power. They merely need to counter the unilateral power that the US has used sufficiently for the American strategy to be no longer viable. This is the decisive importance of Russia’s success in countering the US economic war, and India’s strength in resisting the related diplomatic pressure. BRICS expansion, and deepening cooperation outside the G7 is lifting all boats, and slowly drowning American exceptionalism that, like King Canute, sinks stubbornly in the seat of its golden throne, despite the surging waves of history. There are now enough counterweights to force the USA and G7 ultimately back to genuine international forums, to genuine inclusive multilateralism. BRICS nations do not need to be a new hegemon, but just force the USA to change its mind. Will the elites of the USA drown on the golden throne; or will they save their people from disaster, and allow them to join the peaceful flotilla of the multipolar world?
*****
Have you checked out my books?
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat: Writing on Governing
my book of essays From the Burning Archive: Essays and Fragments 2015-2021.
my collected poems, Gathering Flowers of the Mind.
I have given Amazon links for convenience but these books are also available on Booktopia, Barnes and Noble, Kobo and other online retailers.
3. Using history to live mindfully in the present.
I watched a wonderful interview with Olga Tokarczuk, the author of The Books of Jacob and winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature (Olga Tokarczuk & Julia Fiedorczuk | Księgi Jakubowe/The Books of Jacob).
It is wonderful for many reasons, but one is the reflections by both Olga Tokarczuk & Julia Fiedorczuk on the historical memory and trauma in Eastern and Central Europe of the experience of nationalism. There are many dimensions to this tragic experience, including the Holocaust, extreme nationalism in Germany and Eastern European States, including Poland, between the World Wars, and the complex impact of Communist ideology and power projection on the national experience of these countries. The wound of nationalism and the trauma of loss or nostalgia for . Tokarczuk explains that one of the emotional drivers of The Books of Jacob is a nostalgia for this multi-ethnic, multi-cultural set of plural identities, which her generation were deprived of. It is a wonderful interview and a wonderful book, and I will be doing a podcast and video on Olga Tokarczuk and The Books of Jacob in a couple of weeks.
4. Fragments of the Burning Archive.
On the podcast this week I have released the second part of my conversation with Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. In this podcast Felipe reflects on the multipolar world, China, India, Russia and the Hispanic History of America. We also have a remarkable conversation about the explorer, Magellan, and how explorers and exploration are the frontier of cross-cultural exchange. Felipe wrote Pathfinders: a Global History of Exploration and biographies of Magellan, Columbus, and Vespuccii, and he edited Malaspina’s remarkable journals.
Listen for our discussion of Captain James Cook, his map-making and his relationship with the Polynesian navigator and priest, Tupaia. Through an awkward cross-cultural exchange a remarkable artefact entered the burning archive of history and culture: Tupaia’s map of the Pacific, copied by Captain James Cook. The story of this chart is told in many places, including Di Piazza, and Pearthree, “A new reading of Tupaia’s Chart” The Journal of the Polynesian Society 116, no. 3 (2007): 321–40. This article decodes how the map works and the debates over its accuracy as a representation of the physical world of the Pacific. Decoding is required because Tupaia’s Chart is not drawn on a Cartesian two-dimensional plane, but rather it was a layered network map, drawn from multiple positions. Despite two such different ways to see the representation of the world, Cook and Tupaia found a way to communicate to some difficult mutual understanding and collaboration The authors noted that
Cook clearly remained fixed in his Cartesian world, adding cardinal points to Tupaia’s Chart. But both could look at the map and see their own system represented: Cook reading islands on a grid, and Tupaia reading islands radiating out from different centres.
It is one of those stories from the Burning Archive that show the potential to understand different forms of knowledge at the frontiers of cross-cultural exchange.
5. What surprised me most this week, Alien Son
I saw a wonderful interview between George Galloway and Tony Kevin, former Australian Ambassador to Russia. Kevin expressed his experience of feeling more comfortable in Russia than in Australia today. This alienation from national identity and polity is also what I have experienced over the last few years in responses to the Cancel Russia campaign. It is a very real pain when a culture you love, and a heritage you have absorbed, like a dragon soul in the game Skyrim, is attacked so hatefully.
It reminded me of the title of a novel by Judah Waten. His book Alien Son was for many years taught in school as a key representation of the migrant experience. Waten was born to a Russian-Jewish family in Odessa, and left in 1914 to emigrate to Australia. He remained loyal to the Communist cause and the Soviet Russian world to the end of his life in 1985. Goodness knows what he would make of the vile cancellation of Russian culture in Australia today, and indulgence of the extreme Ukrainian nationalism that killed so many of his fellow Russian-Jews in the 1930s and 1940s. I actually met Judah Waten in late 1981 or early 1982, after winning a prize in European History in a course taught by the great Australian historian, Geoffrey Blainey. Blainey at that stage was, if memory serves me correctly, president of the Australian-Chinese friendship society. He and Waten were friends who did not share political beleifs. Blainey has since been shamefully anathematized by some powerful figures in the history profession, including disgracefully so by the late Stuart Macintyre. My memory of that meeting in the office of the John Medley building at the University of Melbourne makes me nostalgic, like Tokarczuk, when the culture I lived in could more comfortably live with plural, differing and muliple identities.
The memory of this encounter with an alien son reminded me too that from the 1950s to the 1970s or even 1980s it was common for left-wing or progressive intellectuals in Australia to feel alienated from the national culture and polity. Manning Clark used to refer to these years as the years of unleavened bread. Today the left/liberal intellectuals tend to be the establishment powers, and anathematize those who evoke the nostalgia of other identities. Kevin’s interview triggered this surprising and revealing cascade of memories of Waten, Blainey, own experience, and a near-lost commonwealth of letters.
6. Gratitudes and Works-in-Progress
I am grateful to all the resources of history and culture that allow us to find the resources to endure the failures of our time. I am especially grateful to Tokarczuk’s Tender Narrator (the title of her Nobel Lecture) for so beautifully evoking a complex relationship to the past, the present and enernal hpes for the future. I am also deeply grateful to Hannah Forsyth for the interview we conducted today, and will release on the podcast next Friday.
This week my works-in-progress and published content were:
on the podcast I published Episode 114. Exploring World History with Leading Historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto - Part 1
On the YouTube Channel I published part one of my interview with leading world historian, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto World History, Food, and Civilizations: my interview with world historian, Felipe Fernández-Armesto (do watch if you have not already) and a visually enhanced and edited version of my interview with Hrvoje Moric, Why Australian foreign policy elites are lost after AUKUS, while the world changes after BRICS.
On Twitter, I sent out quotes from Fernandez-Armesto and expressed my admiration for Tony Kevin and George Galloway in their interview
On SubStack I drafted my essay on World Cultural Crisis as Carnival
I filmed my ‘Writing in Government Masterclass’ for my online course, which is now maybe 2-4 weeks away from release.
Next week, I will publish my Sub-Stack series on the World Crisis, my essay on World Cultural Crisis as Carnival. Upgrade your subscription to paid if you would like to read it.
On Youtube I am releasing the next segments of the Fernandez-Armesto interview, and a video essay of my personal story and democracy in distress, extracted from Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Bureaucrat. Please subscribe to my YouTube channel and watch some of my videos.
I am planning some videos on shortlisted books from the major history book prizes, the Wolfson and Cundill. These shortlists are great sources for recommended books to imagine the world more clearly with some quality world history.
On Friday on the podcast I am talking about the rise and fall of the professional class, managers and the modern university experience with Australian historian, Hannah Forsyth.
I am also working on my next mini-series for the podcast - all about the Nobel Prize for Literature, in the month leading up to the big announcement on 5 October 2023. Podcasts, and now videos, on the Nobel Prize have become a bit of a tradition for the Burning Archive.
7. What I am Reading and Closing Verse
I am reading some Nobel Laureates for this podcast serie, including re-reading Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob (1000 pages). I am also about to begin some intensive history book scanning with all those shortlisted Prize contenders.
I close the newsletter with a stanza from a poem I have enjoyed during the week. One hundred years ago, in 1923, William Butler Yeats won the Nobel Prize. His great poem, Sailing to Byzantium, captures my mood this week of wanting to sail to a a better world of culture (‘monuments of unageing intellect’), and leave behind the ruins of my career in government, degraded institutions of high culture, and the distressed republics of the West. Here is the second stanza:
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
WB Yeats, “Sailing to Byzantium”
You can read the whole poem in many anthologies or here.
Until next week, take care, and stay sane.