The Neocolonial Myth of Unipolarity

By OOI KEE BENG, in The Edge Malaysia (Picking on the Present column) 28 Sept – 4 Oct 2024.

IS THE WORLD still caught in the ethnocentric fervour of European colonialism, during which the multiple revolutions in political organisation, in energy harnessing, in science and technology, and in military prowess, backed by creative ideological innovations encouraged European populations to think that “The Rest” are antiquated, and that they are the “also-rans” who took wrong trajectories in civilizational development?

Now, the answer is almost a definitive “Yes” from almost everyone outside “the West”, which is a testimonial to the strength of Western epistemic hegemony as well as the tempting attitude among “The Rest” to blame external forces for their continued and historical difficulties in developing their polities.

But what is specifically worth pointing out today—especially today, is how the geopolitical discussion about the recent past and the uncertain present, as well as possible futures, are couched in the language of “polarity”.

What the notion of polarity presumes—be this unipolarity, multipolarity or bipolarity—is the continuing struggle for civilizational assimilation of all parts of the world into “The West”, as well as the providential inevitability of that process. Geopolitical “bipolarity” since 1945 becoming “unipolarity” in 1991 with the fall of the Berlin Wall was clear evidence of that historical process. Globalisation can be reduced to Westernisation. Or should be, in the eyes of unipolar believers.

Bipolarity, therefore, was something that needed to be dissolved, according to the unipolar agenda inherited from colonial times. And the fall of the Soviet Union was that dissolution. But as we quickly experienced, there was never real bipolarity in the world outside of war maps and ideological dichotomies. China was always there as one of many global poles, irreducible into one of the two poles. As was India. As was Brazil. As was Japan. As was South Africa. As was Turkey. As was Iran. As was Saudi Arabia. So on and so forth. We have also learned that Russia, as a geostrategic and geo-economic pole, was not going to disappear with the Soviet Union.

What the fall of the Warsaw Pact led to was the eastward expansion of the Western European Pole, half a century after it had imploded in warfare. The growing insight throughout the world now is that that expansion was not so much that of international free trade, or of the European Common Market, but of the Northern Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). Globalisation as inclusive international trade appears now to have been a cover for Globalisation as exclusive unipolarity.

The Inevitably Multipolar World

China’s rise, to an overwhelming degree something Asians have always seen to be inevitable, is now considered a challenge to the unipolar warrior. While the latter might sound the alarm that bipolarity is raising its head again, the rest of the world decides to imagine multipolarity as the new world order. The success of China in recent decades carries the honour of revealing very clearly the fake status of unipolarity or bipolarity. The world was always multipolar. It was multipolar before Columbus, and it will continue being multipolar after the last Ukrainian has lost his life on the last of the bipolar frontiers.

The many wars in which the unipolar power has been involved in since the 1940s all testify to the fact that multipolarity is the essence of humanity.

The truth is, it is with gnawing unease over the persistent search for unipolar hegemony in Western geostrategic thinking that The Rest today has latched on to the term “multipolarity” as its anti-neocolonial manoeuvre, accompanied by the term “Global South” regaining prominence 30 years after the prescribed “bipolarity” of the post-WWII era was deconstructed, destroyed and mummified.

The fact that China remaining poor and colonisable—or in ruins—appears more and more to be a prerequisite for unipolarity to triumph—a wall it has to break—should be warning enough to “The Rest” or “The Global South” that some other game is afoot. And that game is not a new one. In fact, it is a game that “The West”, as if arriving at The End of Days, are perceiving as being in the end-game stage.

Can we then avoid using “multipolarity” as the chosen term to express resistance to the unipolar crusade and its wish for all humans to accept western assimilation or pay the final cost for refusing? Multilateralism, minilateralism, bilateralism, perhaps, are more promising notions to adopt? These latter terms connote much more agency in its actors, and embrace the diversity in agenda and ambitions of nations and peoples throughout the world much more.

While the regionalist ambitions of the Cold War years—the bipolar period—were hatched to oppose one side or the other, or in the case of ASEAN, to not take sides ostensibly, multilateral agglomerations such as BRICS now champion the spirit of multipolarity in a deeper sense. And multipolarity not merely in opposition to unipolarity, but as a new model for international relations to expand and in which multiple agency is properly recognised.

The wisdom learned in Europe—and the world—over the last few hundred years is that “fair trade” and “mutual aid” offer the best chance for humanity’s many poles to live in peace for any substantial period of time. And so, “trade wars” are a travesty, an archaic condition; something that should be avoided for its discarding of lessons learned in such costly fashion in the history of globalisation, and for its ignoring of the diversity of humankind.

So, enough talk of polarity and polarisation, discard the use of unipolarity for the insidious aggression it injects into global discourses. Replace these with notions nurtured on acceptance of the diversity of human wishes, the multi-agency of societies and states, and the multiple civilizational nature of human existence.

Datuk Dr Ooi Kee Beng is the Executive Director of Penang Institute, and Senior Visiting Fellow at ISEAS — Yusof Ishak Institute. His latest book is the tenth compilation of his published thoughts, collated as “The Reluctant Nation: Malaysia’s Vain Search for Common Purpose” (Gerakbudaya 2024). Homepage: wikibeng.com.