The international order established eighty years ago, at the end of the Second World War, guaranteed decades of prosperity and stability. But that world no longer exists. Over the past fifty years, there has been a massive shift of economic, scientific, and technological power from the West to the East — a structural transformation that makes a revision of the global order inevitable.
As Kishore Mahbubani, Singaporean diplomat and scholar, author of The Asian 21st Century (Springer, 2022), clearly points out, the scale of change is striking. In 1980, the economy of the European Union was ten times larger than China’s; today they are roughly equal, and by 2050 the EU will be half the size of China’s. In 1990, Britain’s GDP was four times that of India; today India has overtaken the UK and, by 2050, will have an economy four times larger. In 2000, Germany’s GDP was three times that of ASEAN (the Southeast Asian nations); by mid-century it will be half. Transformations of such magnitude, occurring within a single generation, are exceedingly rare in history — and they show that the future will be increasingly Asian, not merely Chinese.
Over the same period, the United States has maintained a stable share of global GDP but has undergone deep deindustrialization and now lives with a public debt of $35 trillion. Interest payments — second only to healthcare spending — have surpassed defense expenditures. Europe, for its part, has seen its economic weight shrink by one-third since 1980. In this context, the West appears lagging not only economically, scientifically, and technologically, but also culturally and morally — as the tragedy of Gaza reminds us every day.
China, by contrast, is now the leading trading partner of every African nation. It does not present itself as a political model to be exported, but rather offers a pragmatic approach to economic relations — in sharp contrast with a West that, with few exceptions, has continued to perpetuate colonial-style relationships long after the formal end of colonialism.
The West’s resistance to adapting to this new balance of power is evident in international institutions. In the International Monetary Fund, Europe holds 26% of the voting power while representing only 17% of global GDP; China, with the same economic weight, holds just 6%. At the UN Security Council, the United Kingdom and France — now marginal powers — still retain two permanent seats inherited from 1945, while countries such as India and Brazil, which together account for 1.7 billion people, remain excluded. After thirty years of fruitless discussions, the working group on reform has been ironically dubbed the Never-ending UN Security Council Reform Group.
The West represents barely 12% of the world’s population, compared to 88% for the rest of the planet. In an interconnected “global village,” the village council must reflect real power relations. Unfortunately, in Italian public debate, these epochal shifts are almost always reduced to the false dichotomy between “democracies” and “authoritarian states.” The few attempts to move beyond this simplification — such as the recent initiative Disarm, the Courage of Peace held in Sesto Fiorentino — are systematically marginalized by mainstream media.
The real issue is not “democracy versus authoritarianism” but the conflict between the interests of the few and those of the many. In Russia and China, oligarchs remain largely outside political power, and over the past twenty-five years the living conditions of the lower classes have clearly improved. In the West, by contrast, politics appears increasingly subordinated to vast economic and financial concentrations. This accumulation of wealth and power has profoundly eroded democratic principles, effectively excluding large segments of the population from meaningful participation in political decision-making.
This drift is particularly evident in Europe, where political elites seem to have only one strategic goal: “to weaken Russia.” This leads to investing in weapons without building armies, precisely because public opinion remains broadly opposed to war. The real challenge, therefore, is not ideological but political: to build an international order that reflects the new balance of power and prevents the Western ruling classes’ stubborn attachment to outdated privileges from leading to instability and conflict. The world has already changed; the choice now is whether to acknowledge it and negotiate a shared future — or to chase a past that will not return. This time, however, unlike in the past, there will be no room for error: adapt or be swept away.
Francesco Sylos Labini 