The Global North and South at a Crossroads: Preparing for Multipolar Stability

By OOI KEE BENG, presentation at the Baichuan Forum: “Global South in Transition: Geopolitical Dynamics and Development Cooperation”, 24-25 May 2025, Organised by CUHK-Shenzhen and Iinstitute for International Affairs, Qianhai

Adopting different timespans provide for different glimpses of the subject in question. Different timespans also impact the concepts being used to decide them.

This weekend, we are here to talk about the Global South. The need for the term “Global South”, however vague its denotations and connotations, is not only based on the level of development of the countries classed within it, or their geographical location. It is not even only about the difference between them and the so-called developed countries.

It is more potently about the unequal relationship between these developed countries and the so-called developing countries, most of which are post-colonial in one way or another. That unequal relationship was already what the Bandung Conference of 1955 was concerned about.

The end of the colonial period, which we may consider to be the two decades following the termination of the Second World War and the Pacific War in 1945, did not mean the end of geo-economic inequalities and suppression. Far from it. As an aside, I would simplify “colonialism”, given the advantage of hindsight, as an extended period amounting to “Geo-economic Globalisation”.

The Cold War which raged for another 35 years involved most countries we consider to be from the Global South. Nationalism raged too, simultaneously, deeply affected by the contingencies of the main actors in the Cold War.

In Southeast Asia, during the Cold War, the countries in the region were trying to achieve domestic consolidation while managing their relationship vis-à-vis the Big Powers, which deeply affecting their near-foreign stances with their neighbours. From the point of view of the Big Powers, this was a Bipolar Period. Southeast Asia was divided into an ASEAN whose founders were all western allies at the that time, and the regionalism in that region could be fully inclusive only during the 1990s, after we entered the so-called Unipolar Period.

What I wish to draw attention to here is that the concepts of Bipolar Period and the Unipolar Period are perspectives suggesting a progression and a timeline most relevant to western concerns. The narrative we have inherited is that:

1. The so-called World War II was fought against fascist regimes and won by liberal forces (with help from the communist Soviet Union). It was thus in effect a war that prepared the way for the fall of colonialism;
2. The so-called Cold War which began immediately after WWII, or in the East Asian case, was the next step in the liberal forces’ struggle against authoritarianism, now in the form of Soviet Communism; We simplify this period today as the Bipolar Period;
3. The end of the Soviet Union signalled the beginning of the Unipolar Period.
4. That Unipolar Period must continue if there is to be lasting and moral order in the world.

From the point of view of the dominant Anglo-Saxon view on Liberal Democracy, both Fascism and Communism were “warped” versions of modernity. The “unwarped” version, in that context, is Liberal Democracy as the basis for globalisation, and it had to lead to Unipolarity as the only correct version for global stability.

Insistence on continuation of this script is the challenge the rest of the world—meaning the Global South first of all—has to face today.

Now, although Francis Fukuyama’s silly claim about the End of History at this point appears silly today, the sentiment and the historical path dependence he entertained then was a very common one, and not only in the West. But as Islamist revivalism and resistance took on highly challenging tones in the 21^st century, the sense of triumphalism had to be discarded. However, that did not mean at all that the historical path dependence that has been so pivotal to the West’s sense of purpose and its need for ideological, technological and economic hegemony—increasingly flagged as the Spread and Defence of Democracy, and of Free Trade—would also be discarded.

That has remained, mainly to provide moral rationale to the colonial exploitation of the past and its remnants, as well as the economic and ideological hegemony the West continues to require in order to maintain its sense of purpose and superiority. This is notwithstanding the Asian Dragons of the 1990s–what I would call “The Confucian Challenge”–, or “The Islamist Defiance” post-2001.

We are truly at a crossroads. This is a crossroads of much greater historical and globalist import than that presented by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that presented by the fall of the Berlin Wall. This one requires a proper development of alternatives—in geo-economics and finance, in global infrastructure of trade and industry, in communication and ideological inclusiveness, and most importantly of all, in viable internationalism.

As we prepare for a worldview and for global perspectives that offer a path to equality, opportunities and respect for all nationalities and countries and peoples, it is important that we work our way backwards from a future multipolar situation that we hope and imagine to be stable, inclusive and peaceful.

Much has happened in the last few years that hints at what a sustainable multipolar world may look like. To bring that world into sharper focus, we would do well to consider certain dynamics that are hard to deny, and to be conscious of notions that clearly stem from the Unipolar Period and the historical and ideological path of dependence which has been propagated to justify its past and its present.

Why the notion of the Global South is important today is the fact that it surfaced as a vague yet hopeful wish for broad collaboration among post-colonial peoples, governments and economies. They sought to strengthen the notion of exercising their independence, regaining their cultural pride, and securing an effective position in deciding the future of the world. How this ambition would sit with the Developed World was always the tentative factor.

In that sense, the Bandung Spirit has lived on, through the Cold War, through the Unipolar Period, into a time when a multipolar construction for international peace appears more and more possible.

At the moment, Western powers are in a quandary, and are in fact faced with issues left unresolved in the late 1940s. This involves national and continental defence and the role of NATO in this vital matter. The predication faced by US allies in Asia, especially East Asia, is a central issue in the development of a multipolar world.

The heartening electoral results in Canada and Australia in recent weeks are hopeful signs that certain regions in the Developed World—perhaps culturally fringe areas—are waking up to realities that the end of the Cold War in 1991 allowed to ripen.

In our region, the most significant of these realities are the rise of China, and the rise of ASEAN as a region exhibiting great importance to both China, and to the West. ASEAN’s significance is a broad one, covering strategic concerns, being vital nodes in the supply chain of many key industries, being a huge growing economic powerhouse and market, and being committed to peaceful development through international free trade and neutrality.

For a multipolar world to develop, therefore, it is not only the potential major poles themselves that need watching. Equally important are the middle powers, and the regional instincts of these middle powers as well.

Almost by definition, a unipolar world could only be built through conquest and control. A multipolar one, it would seem, has to be one that is inclusive in its construction. It cannot be totally a bottom-up movement—that is simply too idealistic and anarchistic—but one that expands from the middle. Just as how a large middle stabilises a modern economy, multiple poles collaboratively attached to their surrounding regions, and to other poles at the same time, will allow for a steady multilateral movement towards a multipolarity that we can all live with.

Let me end in a novel way, by hinting at some new subjects that will appear in our universities in the near future, and that will need serious and honest study. This is by way of illustrating further where my imagination is taking me. These will be subjects like:

1. Bufferism in a Multipolar World;
2. The History and Future of Internationalism;
3. Multiple Tiers as the Final Solution in Human Organisation;
4. The Future of Subsidiarity and Federalism;
5. Governance as a Technical Matter;
6. Emerging from Nationalism towards Regionalism and Multipolarity.

Thank you for your attention.