Once master of the world’s clocks, the West now seems to be chasing the hands it itself has thrown out of whack.
The paradigmatic exhaustion of the West
The West, long perceived as the principal vector of so-called political, economic, and cultural “modernity,” is today facing a systemic crisis of legitimacy and historical relevance. This decline is not the result of a cyclical accident but of paradigmatic exhaustion: the Western liberal model, based on the universalization of Euro-Atlantic norms, is no longer able to impose itself as a global reference point. The very idea of an international order based on “common values” is collapsing in the face of the reality of a plural world, where development trajectories can no longer be dictated by the prescriptions of Washington or Brussels, much less London.
The Western claim to embody the end of history—as formulated by Francis Fukuyama in the aftermath of the Cold War—now appears to be an obsolete ideological construct, incapable of explaining contemporary dynamics. Unilateral military interventions, extraterritorial sanctions policies, and moralizing rhetoric about human rights have not only failed to produce stability but have often generated the opposite effects: regional fragmentation, identity radicalization, and growing rejection of Western interference.
Economically, the excessive financialization of Western economies, coupled with accelerated deindustrialization, has created structural vulnerability to emerging productive powers. The inability to control supply chains, highlighted by the conflict in Ukraine—a geopolitical extension of the 2014 Maidan coup acked by Western powers—has revealed the West’s strategic dependence on Eurasia. Moreover, internal political fragmentation—exemplified by the rise of populism, social polarization, and loss of trust in institutions—reflects a weakening of the social contract that underpinned the stability of liberal democracies.
The West, in short, no longer guides history: it comments on it, regrets it, and sometimes caricatures it. Its normative discourse, increasingly disconnected from geopolitical realities, clashes with the growing indifference of the rest of the world, which no longer recognizes the West’s monopoly on legitimacy.
Towards an epistemological reconfiguration of the world
In contrast to this Western inertia, the Global South—led in particular by China, Russia, India, and coalitions such as the BRICS and the SCO—is establishing itself as the laboratory for an epistemological reconfiguration of the international system. This movement is not limited to a redistribution of power: it involves a redefinition of the very principles of the world order, based on the plurality of models, the sovereignty of trajectories, and the challenge to the Western normative monopoly.
China embodies this dynamic with remarkable strategic clarity. The SCO summit on August 31 and September 1 in Tianjin, as well as the gigantic parade commemorating the 80th anniversary of China’s victory over militaristic Japan on September 3 in Beijing—marking the end of World War II in Asia—hammered the final nail into the West’s coffin. Through Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road Initiative, the Middle Kingdom is proposing an integrative vision of development based on the interconnection of infrastructure, bilateral cooperation, and respect for national sovereignty. This project, far from being a simple geoeconomic tool, constitutes a conceptual alternative to liberal universalization: it values stability, shared growth, and non-interference.
Russia, for its part, is reaffirming a Westphalian conception of the international order, based on the balance of power and the recognition of spheres of influence. By rejecting NATO’s indefinite expansion and reorienting its diplomacy toward Eurasia, Moscow is participating in the deconstruction of the Western narrative of the “international community,” often reduced to a closed club of Atlanticist powers.
The BRICS Alliance, by expanding its membership and developing alternative mechanisms for financing, trade, and governance, embodies the Global South’s desire to build a multipolar world, where long-marginalized voices become normative actors. This rise in power is not based on a logic of confrontation but on an affirmation of the diversity of models and civilizations.
Thus, history no longer unfolds according to the Cartesian coordinates of the West. It is written elsewhere, in multiple languages, according to plural rhythms, and with ambitions that no longer require the validation of the old metropolises. The West, by attempting to slow this dynamic with instruments of terror and coercion—proxy wars, sanctions, narratives, exclusions—only underscores its own discrepancy. It is no longer the center of the world but a periphery that ignores itself.
Inevitably, a prisoner of its certainties and blinded by its dogmas, the West contemplates history receding—while its future is written on the margins, in the ink of its own decline.
Mohamed Lamine KABA, Expert in geopolitics of governance and regional integration, Institute of Governance, Humanities and Social Sciences, Pan-African University
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