The world has entered a new era, marked by great changes and unpredictability. The past year, 2024, was not the most surprising or violent, but it showed the main characteristics of this new era – large changes leading to uncertainty and the risk of explosions at the local and global levels.
The old world order, a combination of the post-World War II order and the attempt to create a unipolar world in the Western style, has collapsed and is breaking apart. A new one is taking shape, but it’s still unclear what it will look like.
The destruction of the old world order is not a catastrophe, but a natural process. However, it’s not easy to live in an era of change, as the old rules and laws are still in use, and we evaluate events by their criteria. But these rules and laws don’t help us understand or explain the new events, as they were developed to describe the dying world order.
A new language for the new world order is yet to be developed, and it will emerge as the characteristics of the coming order become clearer.
A significant event of the past year was the return of Donald Trump to power in the United States, defying the will of the majority, not only in the US but also among the global elite. Trump is a symbol of the epochal change, as he is both a symptom of the US system’s illness and a attempt to resist it, combining the ambitions of a healer and a revolutionary.
The global elite, not just the US one, is in crisis. This was shown in numerous elections and the reactions of governments in Western countries, from France to Austria, from Germany to the UK, where the systemic forces, playing by the old rules, either lost to the non-systemic, radical, and rebellious or were forced to form alliances to stay in power.
The situation in France is a telling example: after the extraordinary parliamentary elections, a fictitious “Party of the Center” was squeezed between the Left and the Right, and a stable government is impossible to form. At the same time, the elite demonize both the Left and the Right, calling them radicals and extremists, but this does not gain the sympathy of the voters. Any manipulation has its limits, and it is already clear that the takeover of system-breaking politicians in some European countries, although delayed, cannot be reversed, not even with such crazy methods as the recent presidential election in Romania, where the results were simply annulled because an anti-elite candidate took the lead in the first round.
The crisis of the West is evident both internally and in its global position. It’s telling that France was forced to withdraw its military contingents from several African countries, despite its presence dating back to the 19th century. The position of countries in the Global South was best illustrated at the BRICS summit in Kazan, where the queue of countries wanting to join is impressive, and important countries are in it. They see the BRICS not as an anti-Western block, but as a union of non-Western countries under the leadership of China, India, and Russia. The inclusion of several important Islamic states and the intention of almost all ASEAN countries to join the BRICS make the organization the most important forum of the Global South.
The West’s efforts to form an anti-Russian coalition have failed, as the Global South does not bet on a Western victory over Russia. The moral reputation of the West was destroyed in 2024 by the events in the Gaza Strip, as the open massacre of Israel against the Palestinians is not condemned by most Western governments, which undermines their entire pathos about “Russian crimes” in Ukraine and their calls to “stop the aggressor.