The post-western order:The BRICS countries are creating a new global order. That’s not necessarily bad news

International Politics and Society is a young magazine with a much older heritage. Launched in January 2017, the online journal highlights global inequality and brings new perspectives on issues such as the environment, European integration, international relations, social democracy and development policy. Based in the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung’s Brussels office, International Politics and Society aims to bring the European political debate to a global audience, as well as providing a platform for voices from the Global South. Contributors include leading journalists, academics and politicians, as well policy officers working throughout the FES’s global network.

Whilst the magazine is committed to the values of social democracy, it encompasses a wide range of perspectives. Articles reflect the views of their authors, not of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. We are witnessing a historic shift of power away from the West towards Asia, and the consequences are being felt in parliaments around the globe. Some ten years from now, China is set to overtake the United States as the world’s largest economy. The West is slowly losing its capacity to set the global agenda.

Looking back further in history, however, we see that Western dominance is an exception - a blip on the timeline. For two centuries, an extreme concentration of economic power allowed the West, despite representing just a small minority of the world’s population, to implement its own economic and social models across much of the globe. To most observers, non-Western actors hardly ever played a constructive role in the management of global affairs.

No wonder many in the West see a future global order – no longer under their direction – as chaotic, disorienting and dangerous. Indeed, the majority of leading international relations scholars believe the relative decline in US power will have profoundly negative global consequences.