Chinese propagandists, Muslim BrotherhoodThird Worldists, Chavistas, Iranian ideologues, neo-imperialists of all stripes, post-colonialists and other indigenousists: all share a fierce rejection of the West and the values it carries. Grievances against a real or imagined West are nothing new. In 1952, the French economist and demographer Alfred Sauvy coined the term “third world” to designate countries that remained on the fringes of post-war industrial development. “Because finally, this Third World, ignored, exploited, despised like the Third Estate, also wants to be something”he writes in the columns of France-Observateur. Three years later, in 1955, the Bandung conference in Indonesia brought together the countries that would form the Non-Aligned Movement, around thirty countries from Africa and Asia claiming to want to remain equidistant from the American and Soviet superpowers, NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
For around ten years, the concept of “Global South” – formalized by political science researcher Patrick Peritore in 1999 – has been used to describe a heterogeneous group of countries with divergent interests but which challenge Western hegemony with one voice and advocate a multipolar world. “The middle classes of the South certainly want to live “Western style”, but not under our control”summary Hubert Védrine in his book of interviews with the anthropologist Maurice Godelier, After the West? (Perrin/Robert Laffont), published at the beginning of the year.
The “global majority”
On March 2, 2022, a few days after the start of the Russian military operation in Ukraine, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution condemning the war and demanding the immediate withdrawal of Russian forces. Forty countries – representing two-thirds of the world’s population – abstained or voted against, including China, South Africa, Algeria, Iraq, Syria and most Central Asian states. The official visit of Vladimir Putin in Beijing this week, as well as the regional summit in Tianjin in the presence of the heads of state of Russia, India, Iran and Pakistan last September, illustrate the rapprochement of the Brics+ (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Iran, Egypt, United Arab Emirates, Indonesia and Ethiopia) in the face of the G7 and a disunited transatlantic alliance.
In reality, Russian and Chinese ideologues have been predicting and anticipating this strategic confrontation for many years. “This war (in Ukraine, Editor’s note) has been extremely beneficial to us”explains Sergei Karaganov, theoretician close to the Kremlin and director of the Russian Foreign Policy and Defense Council, in an interview given to the website Le Grand Continent. “It is tragic that this result had to cost the lives of the best of the country, but this war allowed us to quickly break with our last remnants of Eurocentrism and Western-centrism. » Karaganov joins here the great thinker of Eurasianism, Alexander Dugin. Russia, as a pole of civilizational resistance, would, according to him, have an eschatological mission: to oppose the thalassocratic West with a telluric pole, and to unite around it all the other civilizations (Confucian, Hindu, Latin American) which refuse Westernization. For Karaganov, the “external sources” of the “future prosperity” of Orthodox civilization are found “to the south” And “to the east”.
In China, precisely, the notion of “global majority” theorized by Karaganov (as opposed to “golden billion” Western) finds an echo in the writings of Wang Huning, the organic intellectual of the Chinese Communist Party. In 1989, shortly after the Tiananmen massacre, he published America Against Americathe account of his trip to the United States. In the last chapter of the book, Wang announces “the beginnings of the crisis” American: an individualism which empties the family of its substance; the mediocrity of secondary education; juvenile delinquency; the proliferation of drugs; the mafia and the state’s inability to fight it; the homeless, illustration of a failing social system; finally, the spiritual crisis, the “relativism” and the “nihilism” which are gripping the younger American generations.
The West, a mental space
Does this mean that the non-Western world now understands the West better than the West understands itself? “Fifteen years of hegemony have accustomed us to believing that our points of view represented the general interest”said Kissinger in 1965. Sixty years later, Western hegemony is over, American unilateralism is increasingly contested, the “end of history” announced by Fukuyama and the illusion of an eternally liberal world are a distant memory. Ultimately, what remains of the West in a multipolar world? If we stick to its geopolitical definition (North America, Australia, Japan and Europe), we can say that it is a relatively recent creation, resulting from the post-war period and the institutions that shaped it (UN, IMF, NATO, Gatt, WTO, dollarization).
We cannot reduce the West to a geopolitical space
But it would be simplistic to confine the West to a geopolitical – or even geographical – space. In What is the West? (PUF, 2004), the philosopher Philippe Nemo puts forward the idea that the West is neither a geography nor a race, but a singular culture born from five “events” cumulative histories: 1) the Greek invention of the city, science and rationality; 2) Roman law, private property and humanism, i.e. the idea of a universal and abstract law, applicable to all; 3) biblical ethics and Judeo-Christian eschatology, that is to say the notion of the dignity of the person and of history as progress; 4) the “papal revolution” from the 11th century, the separation of the spiritual and the temporal, the autonomy of canon law and the birth of the modern state of law; 5) the modern revolutions of liberal democracy, the market economy and human rights.
However, the most original definition of what the West is – or more specifically what Europe is – is found in George Steiner. The Franco-American philosopher proposes five “axioms” to define the soul of the Old Continent: cafes (“Draw the map of cafes, you will obtain one of the essential milestones of the “notion of Europe””) ; the landscape on a human scale of walking; streets and squares named after statesmen, scientists, artists, writers; the dual Athenian and Jerusalemite origin; finally, the awareness of one’s own end. Perhaps this is what makes the West unique: its capacity to doubt, and even more so to doubt itself.
Perhaps this is what makes the West unique: its capacity to doubt, and even more so to doubt oneself.
The consciousness of “Hegelian sunset” or the mortal nature of civilizations, to use Valéry’s words, distinguishes Western civilization from its direct competitors. But this hyperbolic doubt is double-edged: by dint of doubting, Western man forgets his roots and his deep identity – something that Milan Kundera foresaw in a text that has remained famous, A kidnapped West. “In Europe, Europe is no longer seen as a value”he noted in 1983. Hence this paradox: under the Soviet yoke, central Europeans defended the West more fiercely than Westerners themselves, because they knew what they were losing. At a time when the West is gripped by a vacuum, it is still from its periphery – think of the Ukrainian fighters, the Hong Kong militants, or even the Iranian dissidents – that its defense is most striking.
