Jose Ramos
Introduction
As the United States’ global influence declines relative to other nations, we are moving into a multipolar world order. Creating better lives for the world’s people, protecting ecosystems and the planetary commons will require new forms of effective and equitable multilateralism and a “dialog of civilizations,” where human cultures may complement and learn from each other. Rather than fear projection and petty squabbling, our new era provides the opportunity to engage in trans-civilizational learning and problem solving to address our great challenges.
Galtung Was Right
Johan Galtung purportedly forecasted the demise of the Soviet empire in 1980, ten years before it happened. He later created a new forecast for the end of the US Empire, with the approximate date 2025 (Galtung 2007, 2009). His approach was to analyze contradictions; if a system had too many contradictions it was not viable long-term. Because of his intimate understanding of the global geopolitical system, he was able to discern the cracks, fissures and tensions emerging many years ago.
But what does Empire mean in this context? Empire doesn’t mean the end of the 249 year old United States republic, or even its end as a nation state. Empire means a nation’s reach beyond its national boundaries, its profound global influence and entanglement involving cultural, political, military and economic dimensions. As Galtung wrote:
“An Empire is a transborder arrangement that combines economic, military, political and cultural power. It’s an enormous power display that obviously brings with it contradictions. Contradictions are problems you cannot solve unless you change the system, but you can coexist with a couple of contradictions. When the contradictions start multiplying, synchronizing and synergizing, they become serious. (Galtung, 2007, p155-156).”
Empire is founded on processes of linking / entangling interests between elites in the US and elites in other countries, as described in Galtung’s (1971) structural theory of imperialism. Since the end of the second World War the United States has engineered, steered and dominated this global “Bretton Woods” system involving all four dimensions of power: cultural, political, military and economic. Therefore, the decline of the US Empire means the decline of its extensive systems of global power projection and entanglement beyond its national borders across these dimensions.
Even though this phase of the United States empire is in decline, it does not mean there will not be future versions. As many philosophers and historians from a number of civilizations have shown, empires tend to wax and wane in a cyclical or spiral fashion over hundreds if not thousands of years (Galtung and Inayatullah, 1997).
Yet the historical moment is significant in terms of Galtung’s specific words: “When the contradictions start multiplying, synchronizing and synergizing, they become serious.” These “multiplying, synchronizing and synergizing” contradictions include Trump’s erratic global tariff war, NATO’s defeat in Ukraine (and its undermining by Trump), the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza (aided and abetted by US state policy), the fracturing of dollar hegemony, and Trump and the Republican party’s evisceration of the internal capacity of the United States to function (e.g. RFK’s CDC appointment, university funding cuts to the ‘science industrial complex’, DOGE slash and burn, etc), and most fundamentally, the decline of the image of the US as a social model to follow.
Reagan’s “trickle down” neoliberal economics began the steady decline of the middle class. The dot com era and network society (Castells, 1996) transmogrified into digital rentierism (Varafoukis, 2024) and dark MAGA tech oligarchy. Sadly, for the majority life in the US has become a risky game of snakes and ladders, with new snakes added every turn: gun violence, environmental, health care, addiction/overdose, and economic crises. The line between middle income and poverty has become thin ice. The “American Dream” of middle class stability is dead. The social model no longer holds the sway over the world it once did.
From Hyperpower to Multipolarity
The foundations for a multipolar world have already been in place for many years. Even though the Soviet Union was dissolved and communism “lost” the Cold War, Russia remained powerful in relative terms. The European Union, though playing a secondary support role to the US, is a powerful economic and cultural block. China has already become an economic and technological juggernaut and rival to the US. The MENA region, rich with oil and investing heavily in science and technology, is transforming quickly. And internal unity in African and Latin American is emerging.
Many Bretton Woods institutions, initially US-supported but later partially or fully rejected by it (the UN, ICJ, GATT/WTO, and others), still have ample capacity to underpin a new multilateralism. Even though the UN was deliberately sidelined by US-led initiatives like the G8 (Galtung 2007), the UN system still has robust capacity. These legacy institutions will require reform (or even transformation) to make inter-governmental systems more reflective and inclusive of new political realities (e.g., include historically excluded countries, blocs, people), better fit for purpose, and more efficient, as argued by Inayatullah (2025). New economic, cultural, and political blocs like BRICS+ and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), to name a few, continue to build multi-lateral strength.
Latent multipolarity is therefore based on at least four factors:
- first, the gradual or rapid decline of US influence relative to other nations;
- secondly, the rise of global (BRICS+) and regional blocs (ASEAN, SAFTA, GCC, African Union, CELAC and Mercosur, among many many others);
- thirdly, the continuing status of older powers (Russia and the EU after its split with the US), and
- Finally, legacy (UN system) and new inter-governmental bodies that have requisite capacity in multilateralism to adjust to and which can play a supporting and mediating role in a multipolar global order.
The US’ retreat from global influence does not augur a new chaos, but rather a readjustment in the global geopolitical power structure toward multipolarity.
From a Clash to a Dialog of Civilizations
YouTube clickbait aimed at Western / English speaking people propagate images of catastrophic wars between the U.S. and China, Iran, Russia etc. creating mindsets that expect, maybe even desire, conflict and war. Meanwhile political elites in Washington suffer from “top dog” syndrome, a difficulty in imagining a world in which power and influence must be shared.
Yet, in this 21st Century, it is within this multipolar world that we will have to achieve peace, prosperity and sustainability as a human community. There are urgent needs to be addressed to ensure opportunity, dignity and wellbeing for the world’s people.
- Address the planetary ecological crises: global warming (decarbonization), threats to endangered species, industrial pollutants (POPs, microplastics, etc.);
- Ensure peace and security: prevention of wars, ethnic cleansing, effectively mediating conflicts and deterring extreme conflict scenarios (e.g. use of nuclear weapons);
- Economic development: countries and regions need to continue addressing poverty and unemployment;
- Foster trade, commerce and knowledge exchange: countries and regions need opportunities for exchange of goods, services and ideas, which require systems and agreements for travel, trade and commerce;
- Health and wellbeing: emerging diseases and climate change impacts on heath will require global strategies to prevent, prepare and respond to future crises.
A key challenge then is to imagine how these needs can be ensured within an emerging multipolar system.
It’s a popular idea that we are in a “clash of civilizations” (Huntington, 1996) that requires a global hyperpower (the US) to be the Hobbesian Leviathan and set the rules of the game that everyone must follow. Powerful civilizations have historically seen themselves as the centers of civility. In the case of Western Europe and now the US, this civilizational self image has evolved from the righteousness of Christendom, through to social darwinism, and now the flag bearers and guardians of liberalism (freedom) and democracy (Sardar, Nandy, Wyn-Davies, 1993).
For a large portion of the world, however, their views might more reflect that of Mahatma Gandhi, who when asked what he thought of Western civilization, famously replied: “I think it would be a good idea.” Because for over 500 years the West deliberately de-developed the non-West through conquests, exterminations, colonization and extractive mercantilism, rendering advanced societies backward (Marks, 2002). In the post war period the US has been an extension of this process, with dozens of CIA supported coups, illegal military actions and IMF / World Bank structural adjustment programs that have undermined and indebted countless countries (Sardar, 2003). The US’ doctrine of exceptionalism over the last 80 years also includes blocking myriad treatises: on climate change, on landmines, and numerous others.
Western incredulity toward the non-West’s multilateral and multipolar futures is an extension of this distorted view of the world. But the idea that the world will devolve into a “war of all against all” without Western policing ignores the enormous pressures forcing states into cooperation, even “coopetition.” Regions and nations in a multipolar world will demand nuanced approaches to shared challenges, not zero-sum logics. It is a basic equation: if common planetary needs (planetary commons) aren’t addressed and protected as a global community, every country will suffer. It is in every country’s interest to do so.
Another Worldview is Possible
Drawing on Nandy (1992), we can imagine the futures of an emerging multipolar world differently—not as an inevitable clash of civilizations, but as the possibility of a dialog between civilizations, cultures, and people.
Political theorists have long questioned whether the nation state is up to the task of protecting our shared planetary commons (Held & McGrew, 2000a, 2000b). They argue fundamental 21st-century challenges transcend national borders and the ability of any one state to address them alone. Addressing these challenges requires new levels of collaboration and strategies involving many actors from around the world, including, but not limited to, the nation state.
Nandy (1992) argued that civilizations are not the same as nation states. States, emerging from civilizations, use organic cultural elements to mobilise power. State narratives appropriate cultural imagery, metaphors, and stories from civilizational legacies to generate nationalisms that are often gross homogenizations, becoming “militant identities” incapable of dialog. As Nandy wrote: “No dialogue is possible with a utopia claiming a monopoly on compassion and social realism, or presuming itself to be holding the final key to social ethics and experience.” (Nandy, 1992, p8). In particular we see these militant nationalist fault lines through ideological manifestations: cold war capitalism vs. socialism, western liberalism vs. muslim tradition, modernisation vs. indigenous pre-modernity.
The nation state’s reduction of identity and narrative to a limited, culturally partisan form coincides with its power as a totalising force. It demands absolute citizen allegiance (rejecting hybrid identities), monopolises the movement of people and goods, punishes alternate cultural geographies, and assumes absolute sovereignty despite deeper planetary interdependences.
Nandy (1992, p11) wrote: “Fully organized, completely self consistent, aggressively proselytising, entirely self-sufficient visions cannot be brought into a dialogue.” Today, nations struggle to solve common problems like the climate emergency and nuclear proliferation. In a world typified by deep interdependence, states continue to struggle to engage in productive dialog on issues of common concern.
Nandy (1992) invites us to explore the deeper historical and cultural legacies from which nations are manifestations: civilizations. He argued that within civilizations there are many inconsistent or contradictory dimensions and sub-cultures. Acknowledging this internal plurality and complexity loosens absolutistic boundary thinking. He invites a dialog with internally suppressed, critical, and “non-modern” traditions, building a capacity to work with internal contradictions – so that a civilization can learn from itself. This dialog within our very own civilizations then allows for dialog with diverse aspects in other civilizations and nations.
All civilizations, cultures, ethnicities and nations have strengths and weaknesses, vision and blindspots. Within a Gaia (an ecology) of civilizations (Thompson, 1987), our human legacies can complement and strengthen each other. Using this diversity requires deep respect for difference, both within our own and other civilizations. A dialog between civilizations is a critical pathway for our human family to address our interdependent and common challenges together.
A Mini Scenarios Thought Experiment
This thought experiment explores four potential future states based on a modified integrated scenarios method (Inayatullah, 2008, Ramos 2010), drawing on these ideas and exploring contradictions, transformations and integrations.
1. Dominant Vision: Continuation of the Current System and System Breakdown
The current dominant vision emphasizes the power of the nation state, which may manifest as imperial or rogue. If this logic continues, the future is a multipolar system characterized by the simple continuation of great power rivalries and persistent ecological degradation due to an inability to sustain our global commons. As Galtung argued, suppressing or ignoring multiplying contradictions, an inability to grapple with our inner tensions will lead to breakdown or disintegration. This could include wars between nations with super-hardened, battle-ready nationalisms, as well as nations unable to coordinate climate action, migrants and others left in the limbo between rigid, hardened identities.
2. Disowned Vision: Radical Transformation
What the current nation state system disowns is the reality of interdependence, the vulnerable within its own rigid borders, its own minority visions, the oppressed, and the interests of future generations. If this disowned future prevailed, there would be radical transformation. People would unite around shared global commons, free from the totalizing force of the nation state. This scenario might be chaotic, like a “grand Bazaar,” providing space for new voices and marginalized perspectives, but potentially creating opportunities for malignant actors like organized crime or sectarian movements. The antidote is not discarding the nation state, but transcending it through Nandy’s more fundamental category of civilizations.
3. Integrated Vision: A Dialog of Civilizations
The integration scenario is the realization of a dialog of civilizations. This involves civilizations engaging with their own complex diversity that provides a critique of their own inner dynamics, contradictions and complexities, and then engaging with others through dialog instead of fear and caricature. Integration means finding a third path – a win-win possibility – by engaging productively with contradictions, inside and out. Nation states are included but are not the sole actors. A diversity of civilizational voices must emerge, including social movements of the oppressed and marginalized, intellectual and artistic movements, and solidarity networks. Nation states understand their interdependence and the need for sensitive engagement with diverse voices and actors to protect the planetary commons.
What Could a Dialog of Civilizations Mean in a Multipolar World?
Intra-civilizational Critique. Civilizations and cultures must first acknowledge the plurality within their own collective bodies. Addressing internal contradictions and suppressed aspects through intra-civilizational critique moves a culture or nation past aggressive absolutism and is a prerequisite for dialog between civilizations (Nandy, 1992). This critique challenges self-certainty and concretized identities, fostering openness, humility, and receptivity, allowing suppressed inner complexities to become a resource for transformation.
Eschatological Mutations. Civilizations are built on deep metaphysical assumptions, philosophies, and founding myths. These can harden into eschatological nationalisms that refuse dialog and internal dissent (Lichty, 2023). Civilizational dialog, however, can mutate these eschatologies. Acknowledging the internal diversity and ambiguity of philosophical thought forms a basis for interfaith and ecumenical dialogue across spiritual and religious traditions globally (Santos, 2006). The same spiritual forces that energize a civilization can be the basis for a tapestry and ecology of human planetary meaning-making.
Dialogue with the Non-human. Given humanity’s existential crisis and the planet-wide extinction event we’re generating, the humanist binary of “man versus nature” must yield to a worldview of interdependence. A dialogue of civilizations can include neo-humanism (Inayatullah, 2019) and a dialogue with the non-human. This involves engagement with myriad species, rivers, ecosystems, and lands to challenge the anthropocentrism that is epistemologically complicit in our crisis. It may also require a dialog between the “younger brother” (modernity) and the “older brother” (pre-modernity / indigeneity) (Ereira, 2012).
Art as Dialogic Glue. Art is the organic expression of people, ethnicities, cultures, communicating through stories, film, and music. It can be a portal into civilizational deep time, drawing on mythology. It also often expresses resistance, subversion, and provocative and marginal ideas for change. Art is central to inter and trans civilizational dialog, a primary mode of sharing and exchange / mutations, forming a civilizational metalanguage and rhizomatic process of planetary meaning making and recombination.
Civilizational Reconciliation. Historical traumas exist between civilizations (e.g., US sponsored fascism in Latin America. German aggression against Russia in World War Two. India-Pakistan. Japan’s war on China, Palestine-Israel). A responsible civilizational dialog requires a reconciliation process, following models like post-apartheid South Africa. Acknowledging suffering elevates collective awareness and allows for the necessary growth in responsibility taking to address planetary challenges.
Horizontal Solidarities. Finally, we must facilitate a horizontal dialog between marginalized and exploited groups across civilizations, especially marginalised and subaltern visions. This affirms transnational solidarity and resistance against capitalist, patriarchal and other forms of exploitation. Such dialog can counter populist nationalisms, while multinational corporations serve shareholder profits regardless of nationality (Robinson 2004).
Enacting Civilizational Dialog through Collective Intelligence
Nation States must be part of any dialogue of civilizations, but they are too limited and constrained to carry this out alone. We need new historical agents—people and groups able to carry this forward.
We are now more physically and cognitively connected than ever before through digital technologies, transportation, trade, and shared challenges. Network technologies enable regional, transnational, and planetary formations. Drawing on principles of collective intelligence and swarm logics, we can imagine new actors, historical subjects, as vanguards for this dialog.
Polycentric (Anticipatory) Governance
Iaione and Bernardi (2024) pioneered polycentric governance of the urban commons, showing that managing commons requires coordinated effort across diverse actors: citizen groups, government, business, knowledge centers (like universities), and NGOs. For planetary challenges, polycentric designs would bind a diverse set of actors across civilizations. Adding anticipatory governance (Ramos, 2014) would allow these formations to respond to emerging threats and build mission-oriented transformation capabilities (Mazzucato, 2021).
Cosmo localism
For challenges like water scarcity, energy demands, or community building in conflict zones, people worldwide are experimenting and innovating solutions (Ramos, Bauwens, Ede, Wong, 2023). Locally generated knowledge can be shared globally. Cosmo localism creates a positive feedback loop: documenting and making local solutions available to a global community. It provides a transnational framework for problem solving that draws from and connects many cultures and civilisations.
Inclusive Imaginations of Planetary Futures
As Lichty (2023) argues, eschatological nationalisms create rigid future imaginations, and often fearful caricatures of other cultures. Participatory futures (Ramos, Sweeney, Peach and Smith, 2019) and similar approaches can create opportunities for inclusive imagination of the future, bringing people from many civilizational backgrounds into deeper deliberation. The future image emerging from many cultures provides new conceptual directions and narratives. Polak (1961) argued that the image of the future is critical for societal change. Inclusive imagination of the futures is a form of epistemic justice. Leveraging swarm logics, such diverse, multi-civilizationally entangled futures could eventually outperform official populist / militant nationalist narratives.
Swarm Logics to Enact a Dialog of Civilizations
We are stepping into a multipolar world order. Underpinning its success will be a deep process of civilizational dialog that includes people at many levels: policy makers, politicians, business people, scientists, artists, and citizens. This can provide a counterweight to eschatological and ethno-nationalist futurity, weaving a new planetary culture from the threads of many civilizations. This weaving requires us to imagine and create new historical subjects, new forms of intra-planetary agency.
A swarm logic for supporting this would be:
- decentralised, allowing people and organizations to form context-based collectives;
- self-organising, letting heteromorphic interactions produce emergent behaviors;
- translocal, twining locales across civilizational boundaries; and,
- stigmergic, building legacy pathways for such a dialog
This new historical subject is within each of us and in between us, through working collectively in a myriad of different ways. Every one of us has a role and place in this story. Indeed, it’s the only way it can be created.
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