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50 Opinion bne November 2019
The new cold realities caused heated debate at the annual Civilisations Research Institute (DOC) conference on the Greek island of Rhodes. CONFERENCE CALL:
Decline of the West and rise of the rest
Ben Aris in Rhodes
Germany just celebrated the 29th anniversary of its unification and the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The end of the Cold War was supposed to usher in a new era of peace and prosperity, don’t you recall. Indeed, after the initial chaos of the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union there was a decade-long boom and a time of optimism as all the emerging markets began to grow strongly lifting the standard of living of nearly half of the world’s population.
But this decade has been a disaster. The old rivalries have reappeared. The US and Europe have faced off against an increasingly aggressive Russia that has turned to China
for support. Russia has rearmed and China is engaged in
an escalating trade war with the US and is now also rearming. Beijing shares the Kremlin’s criticism of a “unipolar” world led by the US. The world is breaking into two again; a bipolar geopolitics is emerging that has been characterised as
“the decline of the West and the rise of the rest.”
How did we get here?
The opening panel of the Dialogue of Civilisations Research Institute (DOC) conference, an annual conference on the Greek island of Rhodes, tackled this problem and surprisingly
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came up with a fairly coherent analysis and several concrete potential solutions to the problems – tellingly expounded by the women on the panel.
The collapse of the communist ideology wasn't limited to the European theatre and the end of the showdown between the USSR and Nato members, but led to a fundamental change in mentality around the world.
Communism was rejected, but the change was not limited to the abandonment of political ideologies; there was a change in the economic model used by all countries. The forces of globalisation and the ‘shrinking size’ of the world, driven by the advent of the internet, also led to a rapid transformation of emerging markets like India, Brazil and the emerging markets in general, which were nominally capitalist societies before. As all these new countries begin to come into their own, tensions have risen, as personified by US President Donald Trump and manifested in the clash between Russia and the Transatlantic allies.
“We are living in turbulent times and the most worrying development is the behaviour of the president of the United States. Never before has a president of such an important country behaved in such an unpredictable way and made