New Delhi: The era of a few major powers shaping the global landscape through deals and agreements is over, and multipolarity is here to stay, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said at the Raisina Dialogue on Friday.
Participating in a discussion on Finnish President Alexander Stubb’s book “The Power Triangle”, which explored the rise of the Global South and new power configurations, Jaishankar said power is distributed across several regions, preventing a handful of countries from dictating outcomes to the rest of the world.
“My feeling is that we will have a future that will be more multipolar because no country today has dominance in so many areas that it becomes a total hegemon,” he said. He said it was not just a matter of distribution of GDP and capacity, and different regions of the world would be “more contributing” in different areas.
“Multipolarity is here to stay. What we will get is, to some extent, some major countries will make interim agreements on limited issues,” Jaishankar said. “Structurally, there will be no big deal between the powers, and the rest of the world will have to put up with it. That era is over.”
Jaishankar also argued that multipolarity is not against multilateralism. He said: “There can be multipolarity with pluralism, and multipolarity without pluralism.”
“The success of multilateralism should not depend on weakening multipolarity, because weakening multipolarity will not happen.”
He added that changes are taking place on the global stage because any expectation about freezing the system that arose after the end of World War II in 1945 or after the end of the Cold War in 1989 is “highly unrealistic.”
He said India has been hosting the Voice of the Global South gathering for the past three years where there is a “new foundation for the Global South platform”. He added that the era of major powers establishing spheres of influence and reaching huge agreements of a sweeping nature has effectively ended.
