Michael Wood on the rise of a new world order

"The making of our new world began in China just over 40 years ago," writes historian Michael Wood

Published: November 21, 2024 at 2:53 PM

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I’m looking out over the Eastern Mediterranean amid heat waves, migrant crises and the atrocious wars in Gaza and Ukraine. One hundred years ago the British empire was at its height. Fifty years ago we were living under the American hegemony. Now the world order that emerged after the Second World War – economic, political and cultural – is shifting, dissolving like a giant kaleidoscope, and a new picture is taking shape.

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It’s ‘the great global rebalancing’, as diplomat and think-tanker Samir Puri calls it in his new book, Westlessness. It’s a good pun. The truth is the world has been getting increasingly ‘Westless’ for the last decade or two.

The talk now is that although the US is still number one, a new order is arising, with a split between the Global North and Global South where the South no longer believes in the West’s hegemonial narrative and all that goes with it.

In Beijing, smart thinkers now speak of US decline and China’s inexorable rise. President Xi Jinping says China’s new strength comes from the inherent greatness of Chinese civilisation, freed now from the Century of Humiliation, which stretched from the Opium Wars to 1949. Even in the movies, China bids to take over the world: no Hollywood film was in the box office top 10 in China in 2023.

There are, of course, those in Britain who cling to the idea that the old narrative of Western imperialism still has credibility, and even moral force, but it seems to me they have lost the argument now. All empires deploy violence, all are extractive, all endorse cultural and racial supremacy. History has moved on.

Till the 18th century the powerhouses of human history were the populous heartlands of humanity: China, India, Persia, Byzantium, Rome and the Muslim world. The rise of our modern world has its roots in what my old tutor Michael Wallace-Hadrill called the ‘Barbarian West’, when successive enlightenments, beginning with Charlemagne, shaped Western culture.

After 1492 the balance of power tipped decisively with the discovery and conquest of the New World by small aggressive maritime powers on the western seaboard of Europe. Never before in history had an entire continent been taken over, its peoples killed or enslaved, its natural resources plundered.

There are those in Britain who cling to the idea that the old narrative of Western imperialism still has credibility, and even moral force, but it seems to me they have lost the argument now. All empires deploy violence, all are extractive, all endorse cultural and racial supremacy. History has moved on

Since then we have seen what the historian John Roberts termed ‘the triumph of the West’, and new ways of seeing human society. Only 30 years ago Francis Fukuyama even argued we’d reached the ‘end of history’ – that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. I daresay Fukuyama is less idealistic now, given the challenges democracies face.

The making of our new world began in China just over 40 years ago with Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform and opening up, which now looks like one of the greatest events in history. China then was still an agricultural civilisation; now, on some readings, it has overtaken the US and is the largest economy with a fifth of the world’s GDP.

But, to return to Westlessness, Puri’s argument is that in the next era we will no longer see one power dominating; we are seeing now the rise of a multi-polar world. Not that the US is going to fall away any time soon, but the world is becoming multi-centred. Power is moving to China, India, South Africa and Brazil – all members of the BRICS alliance of major developing countries.

It was Jim O’Neill, then at the investment bank Goldman Sachs, who came up with the BRICS idea. I remember in 2007 asking him about the rise of India. It was inevitable, he said, that with their huge populations, India and China would rise to the top once they had acquired the technology that the West had once monopolised. The US will remain a great military and economic power for the foreseeable future, but the tectonic plates of history are rumbling.

But of course the future pattern of history is conditioned now by the giant elephant in the room, climate change. Every week brings us new evidence that many scientific predictions have underestimated the speed of breakdown and its unforeseen effects. Still nothing really consequential is being done in terms of global action.

We are now well into a time of disasters, burning forests and melting glaciers: societal breakdown and species extinction are already upon us. So what the next ‘triumph’ in the history of nation states and civilisations will look like, in the light of this stark existential threat, is a very big question indeed.

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This article was first published in the November 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine

Authors

Michael Wood

Michael Wood is professor of public history at the University of Manchester

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