Opinion | China’s multipolar world order must prove it can be peaceful
China has spent years articulating its preferred principles for the world order. In June, it went a step further, bringing many of them together in a white paper on global governance and setting out how its Global Governance Initiative should translate principles into practice. Two ambitions sat side by side: an “equal and orderly multipolar world” and a “universally beneficial and inclusive economic globalisation”.
The timing is telling. World leaders will gather in New York this month for the 81st United Nations General Assembly under the theme “Restoring Trust, Managing Transformation”.
The difficult word in China’s formulation is no longer “multipolar”; it is “orderly”.
Multipolarity itself is becoming easier to imagine. Middle powers increasingly hedge rather than choose sides, seeking more room to bargain among multiple centres of power. Such diffusion of power, however, is far from the natural company of order.
The post-Cold War era was once sustained by an expectation that deeper economic integration would narrow political differences. Francis Fukuyama gave the idea perhaps its most famous expression. Today, if anything has ended, it is not history but the very confidence that history has a single political destination.
The problem of the emerging order is therefore not convergence, but sustained coexistence.