The Ideological Territorialization of Post-Global Empire: "A World Divided: Russia, China and the West" (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Centre for the Future of Democracy; October 2022)

 

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At the Coalition for Peace and Ethics we have been arguing for years--to the mockery of many desperately hiding behind those tactics in a vain hope to cling to a dying (if not already dead worldview), that the old global consensus-convergence based single global order (led by the United States and its Allies from after 1945)  has been ging way to a new post-global imperial model. That model of post global empire posits two poles, and then the rest of the world ordered in a messy way beneath or between these apex imperial powers. Authority s a function of dependency, and dependency is in turn a function of control or management of global production chains that themselves are functionally differentiated territories of power relations (see essays in CPE EmpireSeries (148)). 

The Russo-Ukrainian War, though a last gasp exercise in reactionary nostalgia for forms of empire (grounded in racist, ethno-national aspirations and focused on territory as a marker of authority), has accelerated  the movement toward alignment by second and lower ordered states around the two apex hubs--one with a capital in Washington D.C., and the other with its capital in Beijing.  

A recent study appears to provide a very interesting mapping of the new ideological divide. In A World Divided: Russia, China and the West (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Centre for the Future of Democracy; October 2022; https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.90281), authors Roberto S. Foa, Margot Mollat, Han Isha, Xavier Romero-Vidal, David Evans, & Andrew J. Klassen "“harmonised” data from surveys conducted in 137 countries, including in 75 countries since Russia attacked Ukraine in February 2022, and found a divide – growing for a decade – that now polarises the global population.") (Press Release: War in Ukraine widens global divide in public attitudes to US, China and Russia – report ). On the basis of their analysis, they suggest "that Russia’s war has led people in the West to feel ever greater allegiance to both the US and NATO, and brought wealthier democracies in Latin America and Eastern Europe towards a pro-American stance. However the report also identifies a zone of illiberal and undemocratic societies, stretching from East Asia through the Middle East and out towards West Africa, characterised by the exact opposite trend: populations that have steadily increased support for China, Russia, or both, in recent years." (Ibid).

The avatar is public attitudes toward international politics. Though it is cast in the traditional terms of cold war ideological divides, it does suggest the detachment that serves to differentiate  not just power vertically arranged, bt their distinct operating systems. In this sense it may be useful to note that despite speaking  to that divide in terms of territory, it must be understood that territorial states might be better understood in this century as aggregated constellations of polycentric functionally differentiated legal orderings. 

A World Divided: Russia, China and the West (page 18)

A World Divided: Russia, China and the West (page 20).