The post-Cold War era in the 1990s was shaped by US aspirations for a unipolar world order, which had found their sharpest expression in the “End of History” thesis and the TINA (There Is No Alternative!) slogan. Developing countries were harshly subjected to US-based neoliberal policies that further amplified global inequalities and foreign dependence through a combination of an Atlanticist globalist ideology and military interventionism.
The 2000s shattered the Atlanticist hopes of a unipolar world order and undermined the advance of globalist ideology. Latin America’s popular governments refused to remain as America’s lapdogs: they rejected neoliberal policies and created their own regional cooperation organizations, starting with the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America.
The Eurasian land mass did not fail to respond to intensifying Atlantic aggression or the impositions of globalist ideology. Such regional cooperation initiatives as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Eurasian Economic Union, and the Belt and Road Initiative sealed the end of the Washington Consensus. This change was further bolstered by the crisis of global capitalism in 2008, and in the longer term by US military defeats in countries such as Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. To all of this is added the paralysis of the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico, the European Union over the Brexit affair and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization due to Turkey’s political alienation and US budgetary pressures.
In this environment, it is becoming increasingly important to understand the ongoing reconfiguration of the global balance of forces, along with the newly emerging opportunities for international cooperation and development in the New Asian Century. Proceeding from the above-described context, BRI Quarterly issues a call for papers for a special issue on “The Remaking of the World Order: What of the Present and the Future?” (Submission Deadline: November 14, 2019)