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As early as April, 2022, it was already apparent that the West stood pretty much alone in its harsh condemnation of Moscow’s invasion, which was indeed a violation of international law. For many people outside of Europe, the USA, Japan or Australia, the Russian tank columns rolling across a neighboring country were no cause for concern. The „horror“ was certainly not widespread around the world; it was felt only in democratic, Western, industrialized nations.
Threshold countries such as India, South Africa, and Brazil as well as other countries in the Global South never thought of calling Russia to account, even if only rhetorically. Instead, they accused the Europeans and their allies in the United States of worrying about such conflicts only in the exceptional case when they erupted in their own neighborhood.

Does the West have double standards?
 

Furthermore, they blamed not the aggressor but Western sanctions for the world’s rising food and energy prices. India-born Amrita Narlikar, at that time the head of the German Institute for Global and Area Studies in Hamburg (GIGA; formerly known as the Overseas Institute) commented that »There is and has been violence, death, and destruction in other places besides Ukraine, but the West doesn’t care about that.« She added in an interview with the Berlin Tagesspiegel: »The West has double standards.«
 

It is true that 141 countries in the United Nations General Assembly did vote in favor of a resolution calling for the withdrawal of Russia from Ukraine in February, 2022. But what would seem at first glance to be an impressive diplomatic success should not be taken to represent the mood of a majority of the world’s people toward Vladimir Putin’s imperialist actions.
 

In their remarkable and highly stimulating book, Wir sind nicht alle. Der globale Süden und die Ignoranz des Westens (We are not everybody. The Global South and Western Ignorance) Johannes Plagemann and Henrik Maihack wrote: »in all, two-thirds of the world’s population live in countries that have expressed either neutrality or friendliness toward Russia when it comes to the war in Ukraine.« The book first appeared in 2023, but by 2024 it had already been shortlisted for the Friedrich Ebert Foundation’s prize for the best »Political Book.«
 

The new self-confidence of the Global South
 

In their study the authors also inquire into the potential opportunities that the Global South’s new self-confidence might present for developed, industrialized countries. At the latest since 2008, when the global financial crisis revealed what was, in Chinese eyes, the weakness of the West and the USA, China has drifted away from the liberal order and set a nationalistic-authoritarian, revisionist-imperialist course. Since that time, together with no less nationalistic and authoritarian Russia, the People’s Republic has been challenging the West. There are quite a few counties in the Global South as well as some »threshold« countries that do not want to take a clear-cut position. Instead, they rely on multi-alignment to carve out some space for themselves to make free choices.
 

The ignorance that the two authors ascribe to the entire West is more pronounced in Germany than it is among this country’s major allies, and there are reasons for that. While the residents of states in the middle of the USA, so-called „flyover country,“ may not have their eyes on the entire world, for strategic reasons the decision-makers in Washington certainly do. To secure the country’s status as a world power, the United States has stationed its military forces permanently on nearly every other continent.
In the former colonial powers France and Great Britain, which still maintain a more or less uninterrupted connection with their respective pasts, educated elites at least have a kind of internal world map in the back of their minds on which they would be able to locate places like Khartoum or Phnom Penh.
 

A forgotten colonial chapter
 

Germany, too, was a colonial power until its defeat in the First World War, although it was a late-comer to the „great game.“ But Germany’s relinquishment in the Versailles Treaty of the territories it had occupied allowed the colonial chapter of its history to be largely forgotten. The same is true of Germany’s post-World War II history, in which the country’s „culture of memory“ concentrated mainly on National Socialism and its crimes, not on its colonial past. 
 

»The Germans were especially eager to embrace belief in the end of history.«
Finally, in the wake of the unexpected good fortune of reunification, the Germans were interested mainly in their own country and the problems of knitting together two different societies. Francis Fukuyama, an American political scientist, coined the apt term »the end of history« to describe the belief that the liberal order would prevail from now on and that wars likely would be a thing of the past. Once the confrontation between the Western and Eastern blocs was over, the Germans were especially eager to embrace belief in the end of history. German diplomat Thomas Bagger, who is today a permanent secretary in the foreign office, analyzed this trend long ago in an essay for the Washington Quarterly (»The World according to Germany: Reassessing 1989«). He noted that his own country seized upon the fashionable idea that it was a »civil power.« That is one reason that the Germans had a harder time than other countries in freeing themselves from the end of history illusion even after Russia’s land war against Ukraine had begun. 
 

In addition, many German citizens have a peculiar tendency to think that their own moral standards and convictions are absolute. Yet many indicators suggest that broad swaths of public opinion among the German public do not accept the fundamental changes taking place in the world order. Above all, they confront the new assertiveness of the Global South with a mixture of self-assurance and a refusal to face reality. 
At any rate, outside the circles of foreign policy experts, interest in the motives of democratic countries like Brazil, India, and South Africa seems scant. Those countries joined with China (and Russia) in establishing the group of BRICS nations. Starting this year, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) also have been granted membership. Saudi Arabia and Argentina have been invited to join as well, but Argentina’s new president, Javier Milei, flatly rejected membership in the group, while Saudi Arabia is still thinking it over. Meanwhile, Turkey, too, is considering becoming a member.
 

The Shanghai Organization for Cooperation, another body intent upon limiting Western power, claims to represent 40 % of the world’s population. The organization consists mainly of Asian countries, including China, India, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, but Russia and Belarus are also members. 
Economic motives are of course involved, and perhaps also declining public interest, when important German newspapers continually reduce the number of their foreign correspondents. Even nationally prominent German media usually put only a single reporter in charge of Africa, a continent that after all counts 54 countries and 1.5 billion inhabitants. 
 

There may be historical trends that help explain why many Germans have scarcely even acknowledged power shifts in the world, but that is no reason to overlook the new assertiveness of the Global South, which is challenging the dominance of the USA and Europe. And that is especially the case for a country that considers itself to be very open to the world on account of its strong exports to other countries. 
 

There has been no lack of admonitions coming from the Global South on this point. Thus, India’s foreign minister, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, speaking of the war in Ukraine, called upon the Europeans at long last to cast aside the fallacy that »Europe’s problems are the whole world’s problems.«

»European politicians have long enjoyed holding up the EU as a model for the world.«
European politicians have long enjoyed holding up the European Union (EU) as a model for the whole world. But by this time, they have gradually come to realize that fewer and fewer countries wish to follow the European example. At the beginning of 2023, at the Munich Security Conference, French President Emmanuel Macron remarked wistfully: »I am shaken by how much we have lost the trust of the Global South.«
 

Recognizing this fact, and without much public fanfare, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and his foreign policy advisor Jens Plötner have developed a new strategy to guide relations with the Global South. Scholz is trying to enlist threshold countries and big democracies as partners, and has deliberately refused to issue reprimands or lectures while taking full account of those countries’ own way of seeing things.
 

That is also why he invited India, Indonesia, South Africa, Senegal, and Argentina to attend the June, 2022 G7 summit in Elmenau as partners. There was also another, more ambitious goal involved: to prevent any enduring bond from forming between those countries and China or Russia. Paying heed to Jaishankar’s statement about the problems of Europe versus those of the rest, he tried to convey the message that the most economically potent democracies are deeply concerned about the economic needs of the South.
 

The EU High Representative Josep Borrell, whose term in office was about to expire, delivered a speech in May at Oxford University, in which he remarked: »No matter where I go, I am confronted everywhere by the charge that I follow a double moral standard.« In this regard, the greatest liability for the foreign policy of the Western allies is currently the way they have been dealing with the conduct of Israel’s wars, above all in Gaza, but also in Lebanon. In this context, Wolfgang Ischinger, longtime chief of the Munich security conference, observed last September that »the credibility of the West has taken a hit.«
 

Nevertheless, in this country there still are not that many people who realize that the world isn’t waiting for German or European advice. And here it is worth noting that such different authors as the conservative historian Andreas Rödder and the duo of Johannes Plagemann and Henrick Maihack, both of whom would likely be regarded as being on the left, issue many similar recommendations.
 

No more moralizing lectures
 

In his recently published book, Der verlorende Frieden. Vom Fall der Mauer zum neuen Ost-West Konflikt (The Lost Peace: From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the new East-West Conflict), Rödder advises policymakers to cultivate »credibility instead of arrogance.« A smart foreign policy would »know how harmful ideological self-assurance is, regardless of whether American exceptionalism leads to unilateralism or the German dogma of being a ‚civil power‘ culminates in illusions.« 
 

The authors of We are not Everybody likewise urge that German politics should dispense with moralizing lectures aimed at our partners in the Global South. They plead instead for a sympathetic approach to those natioans’ new aspirations, one that is willing to compromise without abandoning values.
 

They also see opportunities in such a new attitude: »Defense of the multilateral order will thus also depend on the West’s willingness to take more seriously the painful demands for reforms coming from the Global South and to implement them jointly,« they write. Accordingly, it is above all in our own interest to practice the virtues of close observation, discernment, and understanding as we interact with a world engaged in organizing itself anew.