Rising powers and the emerging global order

Andrew Hurrell

Framing Questions

● were rising powers able to mount an effective challenge to the US-led post-cold war global order?

● are rising powers actually powerful?

● what is the role of emerging powers in a post-Western order characterized both by US–China rivalry
and by pressing global challenges such as climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic?

Introduction

At the end of the cold war the structure of global order appeared clear and straightforward. The West
had won. The United States was the sole superpower and the world was living through a period of
unipolarity that many believed would continue well into the twenty-first century. The US-led order had
three pillars: first, the unrivalled extent and many dimensions of US power; second, the Western-
dominated institutions and multilateral organizations originally created in the wake of the Second World
War—the United Nations, GATT (the World Trade Organization (WTO) from 1995), and the World Bank
Group and International Monetary Fund; and third, the dense set of transatlantic and transpacific
relations and alliance systems. The central question, however, was whether this period of US
predominance would last. On one side, analysts considered the stability of US power. To what extent
would the US fall prey to ‘imperial overstretch’, due to the loss of domestic support for its global
hegemonic role? On the other side, attention quickly came to focus on the large, fast-growing countries
in what had previously been called the Third World, or the Global South. Even if one leaves China in a
category of its own, in the next tier down a range of other states were becoming more influential
globally, as well as cementing a significant degree of regional influence: Brazil in South America, India in
South Asia, Nigeria and South Africa in Africa. These developments came to be seen as a power
challenge to the US and Europe, as well as representing a challenge to the historic Eurocentrism of the
international order.

The post-cold war order

In the 1990s global order was widely understood through the lens of liberal internationalism or liberal
solidarism (see Ch. 7) (Hurrell 2007). Globalization was rendering obsolete the old system of traditional
international relations—the so-called world of great power rivalries, balance of power politics, and an
old- fashioned international law built around state sover- eignty and strict rules of non-intervention.
Bumpy as it might be, the road seemed to be leading away from this—with an expanded role for formal
and informal multilateral institutions; a huge increase in the scope, density, and intrusiveness of rules
and norms made at the international level; the ever greater involvement of new actors in global
governance; moves towards the coercive enforcement of global rules; and fundamental changes in
political, legal, and moral understandings of state sovereignty and of the relationship between the state,
the citizen, and the international community. Academics, especially in Europe and the United States,
told at least two kinds of liberal stories about the post-cold war world. Some stressed institutions and
their cooperative logic. As large states, including large developing states, expanded their range of
interests and integrated more fully into the global economy and world society—as they ‘joined the
world’, in the popular language of the 1990s—they would be naturally drawn by the functional benefits
provided by institutions and pressed towards more cooperative and ‘responsible’ patterns of behaviour.
They would gradually become socialized into a Western-led global order. The process would not
necessarily be easy. It would be uneven and often unsettling. But, on this view, the broad direction of
travel was clear. Another group told a more US-centred story. The US was indeed the centre of a
unipolar world. But, true both to its own values and to its rational self-interest, Washington would have
a continued incentive to bind itself within the institutions that it had created in the cold war era to
reassure smaller states and to prevent balancing against US power (Ikenberry 2001). A ratio- nal
hegemon in an age of globalization would under- stand the importance and utility of soft power and
self-restraint. In return for this self-binding and the procedural legitimacy it would create, and in return
for US-supplied global public goods and the output legitimacy that they would confer, other states
would acquiesce and accept the role of the United States as the owner and operator of the international
system. Through a mix of these liberal logics, those devel- oping states of the old Third World that had
previ- ously challenged the Western order (especially in their demands in the 1970s for a New
International Economic Order) would now become increasingly enmeshed, socialized, and integrated.
The 1990s, then, were marked by a clear sense of the liberal ascendancy; an assumption that the US had
the right and power to decide what the ‘liberal global order’ was all about; and a clear belief that the
Western order worked and that it had the answers. The idea that this US-led order was stable was not
confined to liberals. One group of neorealist think- ers argued that the extent of US power was simply so
great that the normal logic of balance of power no longer applied, and that no state was likely to emerge
in the foreseeable future with the capacity to disturb US power and primacy (Wohlforth 1999; Brooks
and Wohlforth 2015/16). This was especially the case since, for neorealists, military power is the most
important form of power. In terms of military power the United States is in a class of its own: it accounts
for 45 per cent of the world’s total military spending; it has an enor- mous lead in new military
technologies; and it has a vast global network of more than 750 overseas bases in over 100 countries.
Since active opposition was ruled out, the expectation was that weaker states would have no option but
to seek accommodation with the US and with the US-led global order. Many critical political economists
also saw continu- ity. Across the developing world, neoliberal economic reforms were spreading, partly
imposed by the US and the international financial institutions that it domi- nated, and partly reflecting
the choices and class inter- ests of elites in the Global South. The commonality of worldviews and class
interests linking the trans- national elite that met each year in Davos would ensure the ongoing
dominance of Western-led capitalism (Arboleda 2020).

The US order under challenge

By the late 1990s, this picture of a stable, US-dominated global order was coming under increasing
challenge. The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 under- scored the darker side of globalization. The
experience of trying to fight a ‘war’ on global terrorism and of using hard coercive power to dominate
weaker societies (as in Iraq or Afghanistan) brought to the fore the limits of military power for achieving
political goals. The mis- match between Washington’s rhetoric of human rights and democracy and its
systematic willingness to vio- late human rights in defence of its national security (as with Guantanamo,
Abu Ghraib, and the policy of so- called rendition of terrorist suspects) undercut Western claims to
moral superiority. And the unilateralism of the Bush administration, for many people, undercut the
legitimacy and acceptability of US leadership. One of the most visible signs that something was changing
was increased diplomatic activism by large developing countries. The activist coalitional policies of Brazil
and India in the WTO provide a good example, most notably in terms of the G20 coalition of developing
countries created at Cancun in 2003 (known as the Trade G20). At the fifth Ministerial Conference of the
WTO at Cancun in September 2003, developing countries came together in several overlapping
coalitions and decided to block the negotiations of the Doha Development Agenda until their demands
were met. The conference ended in deadlock. Cancun represented a symbol of the dissatis- faction of
the developing world with globalization and indicated its greater willingness to act in pursuit of its
collective interests and against the developed world. In expressing this collective dissatisfaction, the
emerging powers of the developing world—Brazil, China, India, and South Africa—took the lead, and
were joined by many other developing countries. A further example was the creation of IBSA: a coop-
eration project between the three democratic countries of India, Brazil, and South Africa. The
organization was formalized by the Brasilia Declaration in June 2003 and was followed by other linked
initiatives that fuelled cooperation in a broad range of areas. A third example is provided by the BASICs
(Brazil, South Africa, India, and China). This group sidelined Europe in climate change negotiations at
Copenhagen in December 2009 and forced the United States to negotiate in a very dif- ferent
institutional context.

On their own these events might have attracted only passing attention. Yet, for many, they reflected a
much deeper structural change that was taking place in the global economy and in the dynamics of
global capitalism. The idea of the BRICS captures this phenomenon. The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, and
China, and South Africa from 2010) comprise the five largest economies outside the OECD. By the early
years of the twenty-first century, they held around 50 per cent of total global foreign exchange reserves.
They had reduced or eliminated any residual depen- dence on foreign aid and, in the cases of China,
India, and Brazil, had themselves become major aid donors. In 2009 these new donors provided around
$11 bil- lion of foreign aid. And they had expanded their rela- tions with each other, with China eclipsing
the US as Brazil’s major trading partner and Sino-Indian trade approaching $60 billion a year. South–
South trade rose from being marginal as late as the early 1990s to accounting for 17.5 per cent of global
merchandise exports by 2010 (Zoellick 2010). The language of BRICS and of rising and emerg- ing powers
took off from around 2003. Both popu- lar commentary and a great deal of political rhetoric focused on
the diffusion of power and the emergence of new powers. The central point of these debates was not
where world order is now, but where it would be going in the future. The BRICS were important not just
because of their recent rapid development, but because of the predicted changes that were going to
transform the global economy and change the bal- ance of global economic power (see Case Study 6.1
and Case Study 6.2). The financial crisis that hit the advanced capitalist core in 2007 fed into these
change and these perceptions. For many influential figures, it was historically extremely significant that
the finan- cial crisis broke out in the core Western countries. It not only seriously damaged these
economies but also undermined the technical and moral authority at the centre of the global capitalist
system. Finally, the crisis reinforced the view that international economic institutions had to be
reformed to reflect shifting economic power. Brazil and India had long demanded reform of
international economic institutions as well as seats on the United Nations Security Council. Although
there had been little progress with UN reform, considerable change occurred in the WTO, with Brazil
and India becoming members of the inner negotiat- ing circle along with the US and the EU (the so-
called ‘new Quad’). For many, a further major symbolic step occurred with the expansion of the G7
grouping of industrialized countries into the Group of 20 (G20), which would now include the major
emerging countries. The inaugural leaders’ summit took place in 2008, and the following year it was
announced that the G20 would replace the G7 as the primary grouping of major economies, with regular
summits of heads of government and an expanded agenda. Across the emerging world the G20
appeared to be a symbol of how the structures of global governance were shifting in response to the
new geometry of power, and a sign of what the future would bring. If poverty, weakness, and political
marginalization had previously defined the Third World, something important seemed to have changed.
As The Economist wrote, ‘The salient feature of the Third World was that it wanted economic and
political clout. It is get- ting both’ (The Economist 2010: 65). Western govern- ments insisted that
emerging powers should no longer use underdevelopment, poverty, and a prior history of colonialism or
historical marginality as ‘excuses’ to evade their ‘responsibilities’ as emerging major powers.

Three questions about the power of rising powers

Debates about the diffusion of power and the emer- gence of new powers have become ubiquitous. But
there are many more questions than clear answers. First, if power is shifting, where exactly is it shifting
to? One view is that power is simply shifting to major emerging states as part of the ongoing dynamic of
the rise and fall of great powers. This is the whole point of stories about ‘superpower China’, ‘India
rising’, or ‘Brazil’s moment’, and about the rise of the BRICS or the BASICs. We can debate exactly who
these new actors are, how they have behaved in the past, and what they might want in the future. But
the issues have fundamentally to do with what ‘they’ will do with ‘their’ power—a limited number of
important new actors acquiring substantial amounts of new power. An alternative view, however, is that
we are witness- ing a much more general diffusion of power, which is often linked to technological
changes, to changes in the global economy, and to new forms of social and politi- cal mobilization. Thus
if rising China is one central part of contemporary global politics, the Arab Spring is another. Both
illustrate how power may be diffusing, but in very different ways. The ‘general power diffu- sion’ view
holds that the story is really about the ‘rise of the rest’ (Khanna 2009). This will include other fast-
developing societies, such as the so-called MINTs— Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Turkey. But it is also
going to involve a multiplicity of new actors. According to this account, the international system is
increasingly characterized by a diffusion of power, to emerging and regional powers but also to many
private actors and transnational groups; by a diffusion of preferences, with many more voices
demanding to be heard both globally and within states as a result of technology, glo- balization, and
democratization; and by a diffusion of ideas and values, reopening the big questions of social, economic,
and political organization that were suppos- edly ended with the conclusion of the cold war and the
liberal ascendancy. The combination of technological innovation with social and political mobilization
has been extremely powerful. In some cases it has under- pinned mass social protests—as with the Arab
Spring and the massive protests in Brazil in June 2013 that brought 1.5 million people onto the streets,
facilitated by social media and new forms of political mobiliza- tion. In others the challenge to the
capacity and legiti- macy of existing states and regional orders has provided space for new forms of
challenge, as with the so-called Islamic State. If this view of a general diffusion of power is true, then
effective power and influence will be harder for everyone to achieve, including both the currently strong
and the new emerging powers. It will be harder for all states to control their ‘own’ regions and to secure
sus- tained support from weaker states. The war in Ukraine, for example, had its origins in Putin’s desire
to reas- sert control over what he viewed as Russia’s own ‘near- abroad’. Yet the course of the war
demonstrated the difficulty of using military force to achieve political goals against socially and
nationally mobilized popula- tions. This suggests that we need to pay as much atten- tion to the relations
between emerging powers and weaker actors as we do to relations between emerging powers and the
currently dominant. Another likely con- sequence is that it will be harder for the governments of large
fast-developing states to maintain coherent and consistent foreign policies as more groups domestically
are mobilized and empowered. The overall expectation would be of less effective power, both within
states and internationally. Second, what is power? Power is one of the most complex and contested
ideas in the social sciences (see Ch. 13). It is an essentially contested concept in that it is subject to the
kind of debate that is not rationally resolvable. There is no overarching theory of social power and no
single analytical approach that can provide a magic key. Political scientists differentiate between
different levels of power (Barnett and Duvall 2005). These include:

• Relational power and the capacity of a political unit to impose its will on another and to resist
the attempts of others to impose their will;

• institutional power—power here becomes the ability to control the agenda, to determine
what gets decided, and to exclude those issues that threaten the interests of the most powerful;

• Different forms of structural power that have to do with the constitution of action and the
material and discursive conditions for action

Others distinguish between hard, coercive power on the one hand and soft power on the other—the
power of attraction, of getting others to emulate your own society and its values. Almost all the
arguments that reject the decline of the US and the West highlight the importance of combining these
different levels: global military dominance, the economic resilience and attractiveness of US society, and
its continued pivotal role across global governance institutions. They also emphasize its unrivalled
structural power, including the capacity to generate and promote the most power- ful conceptions of
international and global order (Nye 2011, 2019). When told that a country is an emerging power, the
first question one needs to ask is: influential over what actors, in what period, with respect to what mat-
ters? Thus one might want to trace the growing role of South Africa, India, or Brazil in terms of their
influ- ence within a particular region and how being recog- nized as a regional power may be an
important part of their growing global influence. Or one might want to understand Brazil’s influence not
in terms of its very limited military capabilities but rather in terms of its diplomatic skill and what one
analyst called its ‘diplo- matic GNP’ (Hurrell 2010). A further lesson from the literature on social power is
still more important. Discussion of power and influence cannot be separated from the analysis of
motives and values. It may be true that all states, including emerging powers, seek power and secu- rity,
but the real question is the one pressed by con- structivists: what sorts of power do they seek and for
what purposes? Thus what makes a rising state want to revise or challenge the system is unlikely to
come solely from calculations of hard power and material interest. Historically, revisionism has been far
more frequently the result of particular sets of foreign policy ideas within rising states that explain why
the existing status quo is resented and seen as unacceptable, even intolerable—for example, that the
existing order embodies historical humiliations (as in the case of China); or that it does not grant the
social recognition to which the rising state feels entitled as a result of its power, its values, and its
culture (as in the case of India or Brazil); or that the existing order works against legitimate claims to
special status within ‘its’ region (as with the Russian claim that the eastward expansion of NATO repre-
sented a direct threat to its own security and to its proclaimed natural right to regional influence or
predominance). Third, power for what? This is the most impor- tant question. It is impossible to make
any sense of the idea of a power shift unless one has in mind some idea of why shifting power is
important and what it might be affecting (see Opposing Opinions 6.1). The BRICS mattered to Goldman
Sachs because they were emerging markets. They were therefore important for profits and long-run
investment deci- sions. But this says absolutely nothing about why these same countries might matter
politically or geopolitically. This is why the analysis of rising powers cannot just involve lists of power
resources and evaluations of how different kinds of power have shifted from one state or society to
another. It has to connect with our theoretical understanding of world politics.

Debating the impact of rising powers on international relations

For some, the history and theory of emerging pow- ers is simple and straightforward. International rela-
tions has always been a story of the rise and fall of great powers. For realists, this forms the very heart
of the subject and there is a well-established set of ideas for understanding what is going on and for
guiding policy responses (see Ch. 9). The names of the coun- tries may change but the logic does not.
From this per- spective one should most certainly care about power transitions. Periods of shifting
power are difficult and danger- ous times. Rising states will naturally seek to chal- lenge the status quo
and to revise the dominant norms of the system in order to reflect their own interests and their own
values. Established powers will be tempted to use their power to block the emergence of rising or
revisionist states, including through the use of military force. Classical realists, neoclassical real- ists,
neorealists, and power transition theorists differ as to whether conflict derives more from the actions of
revisionist powers seeking to remake the rules of international order, or from the status quo powers
anxious to preserve their power. However, in the real- ist camp there is wide consensus that if new
powers are to ‘count’ globally it will be exclusively through their impact on the global balance of power,
and that power transitions are dangerous and unsettling (Mearsheimer 2001). As one would expect, this
approach to emerging powers devotes great attention to the measurement of material power, the
construction of hierarchies of power, and the implications of power transitions and power differentials
for both institutionalized coop- eration and for the outbreak of major war. It is the possession of
material capabilities, and especially of coercive power, that determines whether a state counts as a
great power. And for many in the realist tradition, it is the successful deployment of coercive power,
above all in a conflict against another major power, that is the true entry card into the world of great
power politics. If the results of power transitions are manifest in crises, conflicts, and hegemonic wars,
the underlying dynamic results from structural changes in the global economy. As Paul Kennedy
expressed it in the most influential modern version of this old idea: The argument of this book has been
that there exists a dynamic for change, driven chiefly by economic and technological developments,
which then impact upon social structures, political systems, military power, and the position of
individual states and empires … this une- ven pace of economic growth has had crucial long-term
impacts upon the relative military power and strategical position of the members of the state system …
economic prosperity does not always and immediately translate into military effectiveness, for that
depends upon many other factors, from geography and national morale to generalship and tactical
competence. Nevertheless, the fact remains that all of the major shifts in the world’s military-power
balances have followed from alterations in the productive balances; and further, that the rising and
falling of the various empires and states in the interna- tional system has been confirmed by the
outcomes of the major Great Power wars, where victory has always gone to the side with the greatest
material resources. (P. Kennedy 1988: 566–7) The most powerful and persuasive part of the realist tra-
dition moves beyond material power and stresses instead the importance of the search for status and
the acquisi- tion of prestige. For Robert Gilpin (1981), the existence of a ‘hierarchy of prestige’ is central
to the ordering of inter- national relations; it is precisely the disjuncture between existing perceptions of
prestige and changing material capabilities that underpins the logic of hegemonic con- flict and the
dynamics of change in international rela- tions. Prestige is the currency of international politics.
International politics is characterized by a recurring distance that opens up between changes in material
capabilities and the hierarchy of status, perceptions, and markers of prestige and esteem. This means
that emerg- ing powers are likely to pursue particular policies for rea- sons of prestige (India’s nuclear
test in 1998 is often seen as an example), or because of feelings of stigma, resent- ment, and the sense
of being denied the status to which they feel themselves worthy (Zarakol 2010). Equally, we need to
examine the way in which emerging powers attempt to persuade their peers that they are worthy of
greater power status through various forms of ‘recogni- tion games’—for example, Brazil sending troops
to Haiti partly to show that it was qualified for membership in the UN Security Council (Suzuki 2008).
Finally, if power is shifting and if conflict is to be avoided or limited, then it is crucial that new powers
are accommodated. The ‘Haves’ and the ‘Have Nots’ need to seek new forms of accommodation and
negotiation. This perspective is stressed by classical realists and especially by writers about international
society, who see great powers and great power concerts as fundamental to the ordering of international
society. From this perspective, the natural response to shifting power and to the greater heteroge- neity
and diversity of culture and values is to return to a pluralist and power-centred order—both to avoid
tensions and potential conflict among the existing and rising pow- ers, and to achieve the consensus
needed to tackle new and complex challenges such as climate change, terrorism, and global economic
governance. This can involve the reform of formal multilateral institutions—such as bringing new
members into the UN Security Council. But it can also involve increasing emphasis on different sorts of
infor- mal groupings, clubs, concerts, and coalitions. Indeed, the proliferation of discussion of new
groups such as the G2 (US–China), the G8 + 5, or the G20 can be viewed in terms of a revival of concert
diplomacy. Liberal institutionalists look at these same changes through different lenses (see Ch. 7). From
their per- spective there has been a combination of power shifts together with an increased role for
countries that have much more varied interests, preferences, and values. This has intensified many of
the collective action prob- lems facing global governance, leading to the deadlock of negotiations on
many international issues, such as trade within the WTO. The emerging world has achieved greater voice
and some institutional reform (as with the G20 and the WTO), and it has certainly achieved a sig- nificant
level of veto power. Emerging countries have sought some ways to build alternatives to the existing
institutional order (for example through the creation of the New Development Bank), but these
opportuni- ties have thus far been limited. As the still dominant country, the United States responded to
the challenge of emerging powers by creating new agreements, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership
(TPP), although it later withdrew from this agreement because of domestic pressures. The result is the
paralysis or fragmentation of existing institutions and the danger that significant parts of the emerging
world will be left behind in the new pro- cesses of smaller-group and selective multilateralism. Finally,
critical political economists challenge the whole idea of thinking about international relations in terms of
the rise and fall of great powers. From a neo- Marxist perspective, it is simply mistaken to focus on the
emerging nation-states of the Global South (see Ch. 8). Instead, what we have been witnessing involves
the ongoing transformation of global capitalism from an old core centred on the advanced industrialized
states into a far more global and far more thoroughly transna- tionalized capitalist order. A new
deterritorialized global capitalism is emerging that is made up of flows, fluxes, networked connections,
and transnational production networks, but marked by inequality, instability, and new patterns of
stratification (W. Robinson 2007; Starrs 2014). On this account, trying to count and categorize the
‘power’ of emerging powers tells us very little. Rather the intellectual challenge is to understand the
‘transna- tional whole’ in which so-called emerging powers are embedded, and to trace the patterns of
class conflict within and across societies, the transformations in the nature of states in the emerging
world, and the struc- tural patterns of instability and inequality produced by global capitalism.

Beyond the BRICS: emerging powers in the twenty-first century

Chapter 6 Rising powers and the emerging global order 95 6.6 Beyond the BRICS: emerging powers in
the twenty-first century In the early years of the twenty-first century, the nar- rative of ‘emerging
powers’ and ‘rising powers’ seemed to provide a clear and powerful picture of how inter- national
relations was changing. Yet the story has not unfolded in the way many analysts expected. Indeed, it is
possible to argue that the focus on the BRICS reflected a moment in time that has now passed and that,
except for China, rising powers have returned to their role as secondary or supporting actors in the
drama of global politics. The global system has changed dramatically—due to the return of geopoli- tics,
the structural instabilities and inequalities of global capitalism, the costs and dislocations of the Covid-19
pandemic, and the impact of new and dis- ruptive patterns of social and political mobilization, both
within and across countries. The reality of major power conflict and the potential for major power war
have returned—most prominently between the United States and both Russia and China; and regional
tensions and conflicts have intensified—as in Ukraine, the Asia-Pacific, and the Middle East. US and
European politicians have increasingly sought to frame these conflicts in terms of a deep structural clash
between democracy and authoritarianism. Especially from a realist perspective, economics does not
exist in a vacuum and economic globalization will inevitably affect the balance of global power—feeding
back into the struc- tures and dynamics of a Westphalian state system rather than pointing towards its
transcendence—as liberals had expected. Many aspects of economic globalization (such as global supply
chains) have come under strain. And the state as an economic actor has proved resilient in seeking to
control economic flows and to police bor- ders, and in seeking to exploit and develop state-based and
mercantilist modes of managing economic prob- lems—on such issues as preventing foreign investment
in sensitive sectors, the control of cyberspace, access to natural resources, and vaccine development. In
addition, the salience of backlash and nationalist politics has increased across the world: anti-immigrant
sentiment; anti-elite and anti-expert feeling; dissatisfac- tion with traditional political parties; and a
multifaceted reaction against globalization, ‘free trade’, and global governance. The spread of backlash
politics and popu- list nationalism in the United States and Europe mean that the challenges to the
existing, so-called ‘global lib- eral order’ have come not from the emerging world but rather from
powerful political forces at the centre of the system. As a result, many global governance institutions are
under severe strain. Gridlock, stagnation, fragmen- tation, contestation, and, most recently, backlash
have become the dominant frame within which to analyse global governance. And new cleavages have
opened between those in favour of continued global integration and global governance, on the one
hand, and those who reject the opening of borders, the transfer of political authority beyond the nation-
state, and the promotion of proclaimed universal values, on the other. In the North, the focus has been
on the losers of glo- balization, on the ‘left behind’, and on those threatened both by globalization and
trade and by movement and migration. In the emerging world the global distribu- tion of winners and
losers also matters, but it played out in different ways. Globalization in the 1990s and early 2000s led to
significant ‘winners’. As Branko Milanovic (2016: 20) has argued, ‘In short: the great winners have been
the Asian poor and middle classes; the great los- ers, the lower middle classes of the rich world.’ But
what did this mean politically? It meant that there were very large numbers of people who were still
poor and highly exposed to the vulnerabilities and vicissitudes of the market; at the same time, they had
become more mobilized politically, including in new, technologically enabled ways, and more effective in
raising demands against governments—over participation, corruption, and the delivery of basic state
services. But this came at precisely the time when those same governments were ever less able to
satisfy those demands. The global pan- demic has only served to increase this expectations gap. Finally,
there has been the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, which began in late 2019 and which has both fed
into these developments and had a major negative impact on the world economy and dominant
patterns of globalization. On one side, it seems clear that the global pandemic reinforces the need for
more and better global governance. ‘No one is safe until we are all safe.’ And yet, one of the most
striking aspects of the pandemic has been the strength of exactly the opposite tendency. In many
countries it is precisely the building of walls and the strengthening of national autonomy and national
solidarity that is seen as central to any response. Hence, the need for travel bans, border walls, and
controls over populations at home and travellers and migrants from abroad. Equally, in many countries
there has been a pow- erful political desire to shift the blame onto outsiders: aliens and migrants, but
especially onto other countries, and to exploit the disease for domestic political and for geopolitical
purposes.

Three implications follow for the debate on emerg- ing powers. In the first place, the limits to
‘emergence’ have become more evident. Many emerging economies have witnessed slower growth or
even outright recession, an intensification of capital flight, and an erosion of the possibilities for export-
led growth on which their emergence was seen to depend. As Jim O’Neill argued in 2021, ‘Twenty years
on, the BRICS have disappointed’ (see Case Study 6.1). The pandemic has had a dispro- portionately
negative impact on the growth of emerging markets; inequality has increased; the number of people in
extreme poverty jumped by 80 million in 2020; and external indebtedness is likely to become
increasingly serious. The emerging and developing world therefore lacks the institutional, medical, and
financial means to recover from the pandemic. As O’Neill (2021) notes, ‘[T]he great challenge of how
these countries success- fully transition towards a higher income status for the whole of society remains
unsolved’. At the same time, social tensions and political instability have spread, often driven by
corruption and by protests against corrup- tion. The political crises in Brazil and South Africa, for
example, are deep, systemic and undoubtedly the most serious since their respective democratic
transitions (P. Anderson 2019). Expectations that the emerging powers would overhaul and reform
global governance institu- tions were overly optimistic. Even before Covid-19, ana- lysts were
highlighting the hype surrounding the BRICS and referring to the ‘BRICS fallacy’ (Pant 2013). Second,
these changes have affected the potential ‘pathways to power’ that might underpin emergence. As
noted, much work on rise and emergence has cen- tred on institutions and on global governance. Large
emerging countries mattered because of their obvious centrality to tackling global challenges such as
climate change. Equally, if one is concerned with bolstering the legitimacy of global governance
institutions, then greater inclusion of the largest and most dynamic countries of the Global South and
greater regional rep- resentation are obvious political avenues to explore. For emerging countries,
institutions are logical ‘paths to power’ both as domains for voice and as constraints on the powerful.
But in a world where international law and global governance institutions are under challenge, then
such pathways to power will inevitably be under- mined. For realists, power has been exposed for what
it really is: hard power and especially military and coer- cive power. On this calculus of ‘who is up and
who is down’, the generalized pretensions to greater influence made by, or on behalf of, the emerging
world fall away. Third, these changes lead are leading naturally towards greater differentiation among
emerging powers and will make collaboration among them harder. This is true economically. Rather
than a single collective story about the BRICS’ linear trajectory to greater growth and power, we have
observed instead multiple narra- tives of more measured and uneven growth across the emerging
world, together with a much greater emphasis on both domestic and systemic instability and vulner-
ability (on India, see Narlikar 2017; Basrur 2017 and on Brazil, see P. Anderson 2019; Spektor 2022). It is
true in terms of global governance with a decreasing ability of the BRICS to act together within the G20.
And it is also true in terms of foreign policy. The idea that the BRICS were engaged in a strategy of soft-
balancing to dele- gitimize US hegemony or to argue for alternative con- ceptions of legitimacy has
faded as signs of a new cold war grow stronger (Paul 2018). In India, for example, foreign policy is
increasingly shaped by the intensifica- tion of US–China rivalry and by the Indo-Pacific as the most
important regional focus of geopolitical calcula- tions. Under Modi, Hindu nationalism has grown far
stronger, going hand in hand with the desire to expand the country’s hard power. The stress on India’s
civiliza- tional and religious identity represents a break with the long-standing Nehruvian identity as a
spokesperson for the developing and post-colonial world. Yet it is important to note the powerful
factors that push against these arguments. The emerging and devel- oping world remains central to
understanding both the causes of current challenges to global order and the debates on what kind of
order is likely to emerge. In the first place, the countries of the Global South are indeed indispensable
for addressing global chal- lenges—for objective reasons (the location of forests, the sources of
greenhouse gas emissions, the home countries from which migrants move); for political rea- sons
(emerging powers may not be able to shape global politics but they have very substantial veto power);
and for legitimacy reasons (global solutions cannot work without the buy-in from the most populous
countries of the world). Cooperation in International Relations is often framed as a problem of collective
action: ‘I will not agree to forgo my short-term interests unless I can be sure that others will cooperate’.
But the deeper prob- lem has to do with the distributional effects of coop- eration on the already highly
skewed distribution of capabilities and vulnerabilities. Cooperation over the pandemic is not (only)
about better surveillance or bet- ter exchange of scientific knowledge—or even about vaccine
distribution. It is far more about weak and failing health systems, and the lack of the capacity to produce
vaccines and implement vaccine and treat- ment programmes against a background of economic
weakness and slowing development. Second, there is the historic distinctiveness of today’s Global
South. Even if we place China in a category of its own, countries such as India, Brazil, and South Africa
are large developing societies that will continue to be relatively poor in per capita terms. They are very
differ- ent from the rising powers of the early twentieth century: the US, Germany, and Japan. For all
their economic suc- cess, they remain developing economies and developing societies marked both by
incomplete development and by incomplete integration into a global economy whose ground rules were
set historically by the West. More important, dominant foreign policy ideas are often shaped by the
legacy of historical perceptions of second-class treatment, of subalternity, of marginaliza- tion, and of
subordinate status within what has been widely viewed across the Global South as an unequal and
exploitative global political and economic system (see Ch. 11; de Koeijer and Shilliam 2021). What distin-
guishes today’s emerging powers is their historic posi- tion outside, or on the margins of, some notion of
the West. Historically, large parts of the world have sought to reject or revise a Western-dominated
order that was built around their marginalization and around structured patterns of hierarchy and
inequality, in which they suf- fered consistently at the hands of US and Western inter- vention, and in
which they now face powerful political forces within the West proclaiming new versions of the very old
ideologies of racist, religious, and civilizational superiority. In the war in Ukraine, the United States and
its allies have sought not just to oppose Russia’s invasion but also to portray the conflict as part of a
much broader global struggle between liberal democracies on the one hand and autocracies on the
other. Yet many countries of the Global South, India most notably, have been unwill- ing to take sides in
this way. On the one hand, percep- tions of the hollowness of the post-cold war ‘global liberal order’ are
hard to dislodge; on the other, concrete interests on many issues from climate change to tech- nology
transfer do not map easily onto a clear division between democracies and autocracies. One side of the
debate on emerging powers evaluates ‘power shifts’. But another dimension examines ‘justice shifts’
and questions of race, social justice, and hierar- chy. The transnational scope of Black Lives Matter (see
Case Study 22.2) has accompanied powerful demands for reparations and apologies for slavery, the
return of plundered cultural objects, a heightened awareness of the continued political power of racism
and of the role of race in global politics, and a general argument that, in a post-Western world, the
stories of the past and the narratives of the likely future need to be decolonized. This leads, finally, to
the complex question of what it means to talk about a post-Western global order. It is important to
escape from the shadow of the post-1989 world and to see the BRICS as only one element in the longer-
term historical process by which a previously Western-dominated international society became global,
and as one stage in a longer-term revolt against Western dominance that has by no means wholly ended
(Bull and Watson 1985). The focus on the post-cold war period and on the apparent naturalness of a
Western- dominated, self-described ‘liberal’ order has led to a foreshortening of history. The liberal
order was never global during the cold war. A central part of the prob- lem of global order in the
twentieth century involved the struggle of the Third World (later the Global South) against what was
widely understood as the ongoing legacy of the Western-dominated international soci- ety. The
empowerment and social and political mobi- lization of the previously subordinate has been one of the
great drivers of historic change, indeed perhaps the most important of all. Consequently, the global
order in which we live is now far more strongly global. The longer-term movement towards a post-
Western world was interrupted but not fundamentally dislodged by the brief and fleeting period of US
unipolarity. So, from this perspective, the period from 1989 to the early 2000s is the historical anomaly,
and the BRICS do not stand as some unique and novel development but rather as one element in a
longer-term story.

Conclusion

History has not ended and major ideological and geo- political cleavages about the best ordering of
politics, economics, and international relations have re-emerged. This applies to questions of economic
development where the developmental success of an illiberal and non-democratic China poses the
greatest ideological challenge to engrained Western liberal assumptions. But it also applies to
international order. Writers on international society stressed the way in which the non- Western world
sought ‘membership’ of international society. They paid far less attention to the complex ways in which
the developing and emerging world has had to navigate within a still highly unequal but now far more
strongly post-Western system. This navigation has been marked by battles for recognition and status
and by continued resentment at Western dominance, but also by ambivalence as to what a post-
Western alternative might entail. The binary categories of West vs non-West and liberal vs illiberal are
unhelpful in understanding the debates that are taking place across the emerging world. As a result, it is
highly unlikely that emerging countries will fit into a renewed Western attempt to divide the world into
clear-cut categories of democracy vs authoritarianism. On the one hand, the interests and worldviews of
many emerging powers do not coincide with those of the US and Europe on many core issues, from
migration to global health or climate change. And on the other, geopolitical alliances do not coincide
easily with politicized assessments of who counts as a democracy. The most crucial dimension of ‘global’
does not, therefore, lie in the nature of the problems (such as climate change or nuclear proliferation),
nor in notions of interdependence and globalization and the degree to which states, societies, and
peoples are everywhere affected by global processes. It lies rather in the increased capacity of a far
wider range of states and social actors to become active subjects and agents in the politics and practices
of global politics and dif- ferent forms of ordering, both around and beyond states. It is the diffusion of
agency and of political consciousness that has been the most important fea- ture of the globalization of
international society and explains why the emerging world continues to mat- ter. This means that the
historical self-understandings of a much wider and culturally diverse range of play- ers need to be
central to the theoretical and practical analysis of global politics.

Case Study 6.1 The BRICS

The ‘BRICS’ began as an acronym that referred to four emerg- ing economies: Brazil, China, India, and
Russia. The term was first coined in the research paper Building Better Global Economic BRICs by
economist Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs in 2001. O’Neill regarded these four countries as the key
emerging market econo- mies, and projected that the relative size and share of the BRICS in the world
economy would rise exponentially. In his report, O’Neill also described the implications of this for the
Group of Seven (G7) and called for a rearrangement of the representation in such groupings as the G7.
From this start there have been two ways of thinking about the BRICS as a grouping. The first, and most
common, has been to understand the BRICS in the context of the future of the global economy. In 2003,
a Goldman Sachs report compiled by Dominic Wilson and Roopa Purushothaman, Dreaming with BRICs:
The Path to 2050, expanded on O’Neill’s argument. Their report predicted that, in all likelihood, by 2025
the BRICS would account for over half of the size of the G7 in terms of GDP. And in less than 40 years,
the BRICS economies together could be larger than the G7. Several reports have followed up on this,
offering more detailed analyses and readjusted projections of the BRIC economies. The key underlying
argument behind these predictions was that China and India would rise as the world’s principal suppli-
ers of manufactured goods and services, while Brazil and Russia would become similarly dominant as
suppliers of raw materials. They all have an enormous potential consumer market, comple- mented by
access to regional markets, and an abundant work- force. As will be discussed in Section 6.6, more
recent attention has shifted to the fragility and vulnerability of the emerging economies. The other way
of talking about the BRICS has been in terms of a diplomatic grouping. The foreign ministers of the four
BRIC states—Brazil, Russia, India, and China—first met as a group in New York at the annual meeting of
the UN General Assembly in 2006. The first BRIC summit was held in Russia in 2009, and South Africa
joined the grouping in 2010. Since then, annual summits have been held. Understandings of the nature
of the grouping vary widely. Some see it as a bargaining coalition or even a proto- alliance designed to
balance the power of the United States. Others see it as a caucus for developing common positions on
the part of a group of large states that have been marginalized by the power of the West. Still others see
it as the embryo for attempts to build an alternative set of global order institutions, most clearly
illustrated in the creation of the New Development Bank, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and
China’s Belt and Road Initiative (Hameiri and Jones 2018).
Case Study 6.2 Brazil

In November 2009 The Economist magazine had an illustration on its cover of the famous statue of
Christ the Redeemer tak- ing off from the Corcovado mountain. The idea that Brazil had finally ‘taken off
’ captured much of the imagery of rising powers. Brazil developed very rapidly in the period from 1930
to 1980. But, like most of the developing world, it was very badly hit by the debt crisis of the 1980s. In
the 1990s, under President Fernando Henrique Cardoso—one of the architects of the the- ory of
dependency in International Relations—the focus was on financial stabilization at home, an important
degree of economic liberalization, and a cautious foreign policy of re-establishing the country’s
credibility through joining agreements such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. But it was under
Cardoso’s successor President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, universally known as Lula, that the notion of
Brazil as a rising power really gained ground. Lula’s speeches repeatedly stressed the idea that Brazil is
not a small or insignificant country and that it has options in a world where, despite all the chal- lenges,
unipolarity is more apparent than real. Brazil should reas- sert its national autonomy, form coalitions
with other developing states in order to reduce its external vulnerability and to increase its own
bargaining power, and work with others to promote a more balanced and multipolar world order. The
claims about Lula’s Brazil raised many questions about the nature of power. Although Brazil possesses
enormous natural resources, it does not have any significant degree of military or hard power. Its rise
would therefore have to depend on its soft power, in particular its diplomatic agility or what has
sometimes been called its ‘diplomatic GNP’, and the legitimacy deriving from its role as a spokesperson
of the developing world and from the significant successes of the Lula government at home in reducing
economic inequality and hunger. Yet, in contrast to the image on the cover of The Economist, Brazil has
come to face deep structural economic problems, high levels of social violence, and stark political
polarization. In 2018 the country elected a far-right outsider, Jair Bolsonaro, as presi- dent and Brazil
seemed to follow the global pattern of populist nationalism. Lula was imprisoned, but was subsequently
released and returned to frontline politics. The long-standing consensus on foreign policy broke down in
the face of major domestic polit- ical alignment. The political and party system was unable to cope with
a sprawling corruption scandal; street protests brought mil- lions onto the streets; and, while Brazil had
been able to navigate the 2008 financial crisis, economic conditions became far more constraining.
Many orthodox commentators blame domestic policy failure, especially the absence of serious reform
during the boom years of the early 2000s. Others highlight the difficul- ties facing a traditional political
system in incorporating the new social forces thrown up by the immense social and economic changes
produced by rapid development. Others again point to the structural weaknesses facing a country like
Brazil in trying to climb the global power hierarchy. Brazil has remained structurally vulnerable to shifts
in the global economy. Success had come on the back of huge Chinese demand for Brazilian
commodities and Brazil was hit hard by the slowdown in Chinese growth. Brazil did achieve greater voice
in international institutions. But what appeared as the epitome of an activist emerging and regional
power could quickly shift into the image of a country in deep crisis with few international options.

Opposing Opinions 6.1 Today’s rising powers are powerful enough to affect international order

For

 Most change in world politics is incremental and gradual. There has been a long-term erosion of
the Western dominance of international society. International society today is far more strongly
global—not just in terms of economic globalization but also in terms of the capacity of a much
 wider range of states and societies to mobilize, to express their values and interests, and to
contest the policies of the old powers of the Western, US-led order. The capacity of the United
States to unilaterally reassert its hegemony and to use its coercive military and other power to
achieve its goals is, and will remain, limited.
 Rising powers’ diplomatic achievements have been considerable and have persisted despite a
more adverse international environment. In contrast to the Third World movement in the
1970s, today’s emerging powers are far more centrally a part of the global economy and
international system. South– South economic exchange is far more deeply rooted than was the
case in the 1970s.
 The power of today’s rising powers is not just their economic resources. It derives from the role
they inevitably will need to play in functional institutions created to deal with ever more
pressing sets of challenges (such as the management of the global economy, climate change,
pandemic response and prepared- ness, and nuclear proliferation). And it derives from their
equally necessary role in the creation of legitimate institutions and representative structures of
global governance that meet powerful demands for a more just global order.

Against

 Realists are right that military power remains the most important source of power in
international relations. There is no challenger to the United States, and its dominance of the
new military technologies means that this supremacy is set to continue well into the future.
 The United States continues to have unparalleled influence over international institutions and
global governance. It can use its agenda-setting power to shape new norms and to control what
gets decided. Faced with the deadlock of existing institutions or criticism of its policies, it has a
unique capacity to create alternative options. For example, it has brought together groups of
like-minded states to negotiate so-called mega-regional trade blocs across the Atlantic and
Pacific. The marginal role of the emerging world in these negotiations is a clear sign of their
weak- ness in the global order.
 The BRICS—and similar groupings—face deep divisions that have prevented them from
achieving cohesion and influence. For all the talk of new coalitional politics, China, India, and
Russia are competitors for power and their economic preferences and interests are strongly
divergent. They have very little in common.