By Kenneth M. Stokes* – Article sent to Other News by the author
The passing of unipolarity can redistribute power without producing a more equal or more intelligent international order. Relations of domination may remain substantially intact even when capability is dispersed among several centres. A world of competing poles can still be one in which those possessing decisive capacities treat their purposes as sufficient, externalise consequences and convert dependence into leverage over others.
The relevant question is what happens to power once it is no longer concentrated in one centre. If plurality merely multiplies autonomous centres insulated from one another’s consequences, the same political problem becomes more widely distributed. What matters is whether differentiated centres can remain sufficiently autonomous to resist incorporation yet sufficiently connected for warning, evidence and consequences arising elsewhere to alter their judgement.
This is the unresolved significance of the movement from Bandung to New Delhi. Bandung and the Non-Aligned Movement defended the political capacity of states to judge without submitting to bloc command. BRICS operates under different conditions. Its members possess economic, technological, financial and diplomatic capacities that can give strategic autonomy a material basis unavailable to many states during the Cold War. Greater capacity to resist external command, however, does not determine how newly autonomous power will itself be exercised.
Wider access to modern productive power redistributes capability; whether it transforms power depends on how those capacities are used and constrained. Breaking the historic monopoly of imperial centres over industrial, financial and technological capability is a major historical achievement. Yet if progress continues to be judged chiefly by the capacity to produce, secure, extract and transform, the old hierarchy may recede while its governing conception of power survives. The difficulty is that the industrial and technological capacities now taken as evidence of emancipation are among those whose earlier concentration made extraordinary forms of domination possible. Their wider distribution corrects that historical inequality; it does not by itself alter the purposes, dependencies or external consequences through which those capacities become political power.
Non-alignment protected the right not to be commanded. The question now is whether that autonomy can remain answerable to consequences imposed beyond itself.
Coexistence without alignment
The heterogeneity of BRICS makes the first part of this possibility visible. Its members maintain markedly different security relationships, economic dependencies and diplomatic priorities. Participation does not require a common foreign policy, common political system or comprehensive strategic alignment.
That difference can support coexistence rather than merely obstruct cohesion. Bandung had already established that political association need not depend upon incorporation beneath a superior centre. BRICS extends that possibility into an environment in which finance, technology, trade, energy and communications penetrate sovereignty far more deeply than they did during the formative period of non-alignment.
Its loose structure may therefore serve an important political function. Disagreement in one domain need not determine every other relationship among the same states. Co-operation can continue without converting political difference into comprehensive separation.
Disagreement becomes politically useful when it reveals consequences that consensus would otherwise conceal. Ambiguity can preserve relations within which differences remain negotiable, but it can also conceal those differences without providing any means of learning from them. The distinction becomes important when costs rise. A plural institution acquires greater significance where disagreement can reveal neglected consequences and oblige governments to reconsider what they are doing.
Strategic autonomy protects the capacity to choose without subordination to another centre. It does not confer immunity from consequences imposed upon others.
From multipolarity to polycentric institutions
Multipolarity describes how capability is distributed. Polycentricity describes how autonomous centres remain connected so that information, objections and consequences arising in one part of the system can alter decisions taken elsewhere.
Several powerful states can confront one another through increasingly separate financial, technological and security systems. Each may possess strategic autonomy while treating its own interests as sufficient grounds for action and effects borne elsewhere as external to its responsibility. Under those conditions, multipolarity redistributes power without changing how power is exercised.
BRICS contains elements of a different arrangement. Its members continue to participate in institutions that long pre-date the grouping while constructing or enlarging others of their own. Financial arrangements overlap rather than forming a wholly separate monetary order; development institutions coexist with established multilateral lenders; regional and global memberships cross geopolitical divisions. Such overlap may provide alternatives without requiring international life to divide into comprehensive blocs.
A polycentric order still requires governments and institutions capable of taking decisions and accepting responsibility for them. But no single centre can perceive every consequence of its own actions. Relevant information must therefore also be able to arise elsewhere—from other governments, affected communities, scientific bodies, civic organisations and institutions with different responsibilities—and reach those able to respond.
Institutional plurality does not guarantee this result. Governments can move disputed decisions towards forums in which scrutiny is weaker; responsibility can disappear between jurisdictions; parallel institutions can become rival systems protected from external challenge. Polycentricity therefore depends on relations through which consequences become visible and decisions remain open to reconsideration. Institutional abundance alone cannot provide that capacity.
Financial autonomy and its purpose
Finance shows the distinction in concrete form.
Local-currency settlement, interoperable payment arrangements and the New Development Bank matter because dependence is produced through infrastructures as well as denominations. Clearing networks, correspondent banks, capital markets, insurance, legal jurisdictions, technological standards and payment systems can become indispensable passages through which economic participation is enabled or restricted.
Creating additional routes enlarges practical autonomy when they are sufficiently capable to prevent any one infrastructure from becoming indispensable. The test is whether participants can move among them without exchanging one politically conditioned dependency for another.
De-dollarisation, considered in isolation, is too narrow a measure of transformation. A financial order centred upon several currencies can remain coercive if access to each system depends upon submission to the centre controlling it. Conversely, continued use of the dollar need not preclude greater autonomy where other functional routes constrain the ability of any one infrastructure to become indispensable.
The same distinction applies to development finance. Greater control over financing is valuable where it widens developmental choice, but autonomy cannot be the final criterion. Debt that weakens health, education or essential public provision does not become benign because the lender belongs to the emerging rather than the established order. Nor does infrastructure become adequate merely because its financing escaped an older hierarchy.
Financial plurality therefore requires attention to who controls an instrument, what purposes it serves, what dependencies it creates and whether those affected by its consequences can require serious reconsideration.
Responsibility, standing and correction
Greater representation changes who participates in international authority; it does not determine what happens when authority errs.
Broader representation may correct serious historical exclusions while leaving institutions poorly equipped to recognise harmful consequences or revise decisions. A development institution governed principally by emerging economies can still impose substantial costs upon communities. A more geographically representative security institution can still fail to reconsider assumptions after their consequences have changed. Representation concerns participation in decision; corrigibility concerns the capacity to reconsider and change a decision when experience reveals error, harm or an assumption that no longer holds.
Formal sovereign equality also coexists with profound inequality in the capacity to shape events. States differ greatly in their ability to influence financial flows, technological access, military outcomes, commodity markets and environmental conditions. Equality before an institution cannot make those capacities equal.
An actor able to cause, amplify, sustain, restrain or repair major consequences bears correspondingly greater responsibility for foreseeable effects. Standing follows a different relation. Those materially exposed to consequential decisions require a recognised means of bringing relevant evidence and objections before actors capable of changing course.
Responsibility should track capacity; standing should track exposure.
The distinction prevents two opposite errors. The first treats sovereign equality as though it erased differences in the power to shape consequences. The second converts exposure into a claim to command those who caused them. Greater capacity entails greater responsibility without creating a hierarchy of sovereign worth; material exposure warrants standing without conferring general authority over another state.
What matters institutionally is whether consequences can return to the decision-making process. Development commitments need review while revision remains materially possible. Security arrangements need channels through which warning and verification can challenge escalating assumptions. Financial alternatives should not permit objections to disappear merely because a transaction moves to another institution.
Procedures lose force when governments treat reconsideration as humiliation, disloyalty or loss of sovereign standing. Corrigibility requires revision to be understood as an ordinary obligation of responsible power when circumstances or evidence change, rather than as an admission that sovereignty has been surrendered.
Consequences beyond the protagonists
Interdependence makes these institutional capacities necessary because political effects routinely cross jurisdictional boundaries.
War moves through shipping, insurance, commodity markets, migration, energy systems and public finances. Financial decisions can reorganise developmental possibilities far beyond the institution making them. Technological standards alter access and dependency across jurisdictions. Energy and infrastructure decisions can constrain choices decades after the governments that made them have left office.
The distinction between protagonist and affected party therefore becomes increasingly inadequate as a boundary of political relevance. Exposure does not give every affected actor a veto over decisions elsewhere. It does mean that institutions organised exclusively around the intentions and jurisdictions of decision-makers will systematically lose information about the wider effects of their decisions.
Time matters as well. Present choices can consume future room for manoeuvre. Infrastructure, debt, technological dependence and ecological degradation may each create commitments whose reversibility diminishes with time. Responsibility consequently concerns immediate injury and the foreseeable narrowing of subsequent possibilities.
Ecological effects expose the same problem across borders and generations. A more equitable distribution of economic power can still produce an ecologically unviable world. Development cannot finally be judged by the amount of productive capacity or strategic autonomy it creates if the conditions supporting future economic and social life are progressively consumed in producing them.
Justice plainly requires that societies long denied the material possibilities of development should not remain permanently excluded from them. Historical justice also requires revision of a developmental model whose universalisation would intensify pressures on the ecological conditions that sustain it. The diffusion of productive capacity corrects an inequality; it does not correct the consequences of the model itself. A post-hegemonic order must therefore enlarge developmental possibility while remaining capable of changing what development means when cumulative consequences threaten the conditions upon which development depends.
Climate justice properly asks how the burdens of transition should be distributed in light of historical responsibility and unequal developmental circumstances. A politics adequate to interdependence must also ask whether ecological consequences can alter economic decisions while meaningful alternatives remain, rather than after irreversibility has determined the answer.
Bandung and the Reflexive Discipline of Power
The Bandung inheritance retains considerable force because colonial domination, unequal representation, coercive economic relations and externally imposed political choices formed much of the historical context from which non-alignment emerged. BRICS can legitimately seek greater room for sovereign judgement within institutions whose distribution of authority still reflects earlier configurations of power.
The meaning of that inheritance changes once formerly subordinated actors themselves acquire substantial capacities to shape the conditions under which others act.
The same standard must apply to dependencies created by established and emerging powers alike. If control over an indispensable financial, technological, commercial or material passage can be used to compel another actor, the political relation requiring scrutiny is the dependency itself.
Resistance to domination changes the political relation only when those who acquire power in resisting it remain bound by the standards they invoke against domination. This is the Reflexive Discipline of Power: such actors must examine the dependencies, injuries and exclusions their own power creates and preserve procedures through which justified correction remains possible.
This discipline requires neither a sovereign authority above a plural international order nor unrestricted intervention into political independence. It requires institutions through which those exposed to consequential decisions can bring evidence before actors still able to revise them.
The New Delhi Declaration leaves this problem unresolved. It nevertheless creates an institutional setting in which the problem becomes harder to evade.
Bandung defended the capacity of states to coexist without subordination to imperial or bloc discipline. BRICS can give that autonomy a stronger material foundation. Whether this produces a different political order depends on whether autonomous power remains open to correction by consequences borne elsewhere.
The decisive passage is from plural power to corrigible power.
*President of the World Sustainability Forum. This article draws on the author’s project, The Ecology of Power, which develops an ecological theory of power re-conceiving conflict, security and peace as emergent properties of institutional, epistemic and civilisational ecologies.