The ‘post-Western’ future is here – here’s what that looks like

The moral authority of the West has all but collapsed, writes professor of rhetoric and decolonial thought Salman Sayyid – we are now facing a future in which its influence is dramatically decreased and increasingly irrelevant

If a new world order is finally taking shape, then the Antalya Diplomacy Forum (ADF), which took place earlier this month, offered a tantalising glimpse of what that future might resemble.

It is a future in which world leaders, policymakers and opinion shapers from the Global Majority engage with one another, bypassing Western plutocracies. It is a future that challenges aspects of the post–Cold War liberal-democratic consensus and pierces the historical amnesia that sustains it. It is a future that is post-Western, precisely because it is unclear what will come next.

Participants from Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Eastern Europe gathered in the tourist capital of Türkiye for the high-level conference to affirm the value of diplomacy in bringing stability – and reflect on alternatives to the unravelling of the rules-based international order.

Like all international summits, the ADF was an occasion for the host country to flex its soft power. But unlike the great Western plutocracies, whose soft power often goes unnoticed, Türkiye’s staging of the Forum outside the usual diplomatic hubs of Paris, London, New York or Davos made it stand out. It was not, however, only geography that made this gathering distinctive. The geographical location seemed to signal a broader shift in perspectives and in the participants' engagement with global affairs.

Representatives from the major Western plutocracies were thin on the ground. Had they turned up in any number, they most likely would have been unsettled and disoriented by the debates taking place – not just because they would have take issue with claims such as the Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov’s assertion that Ukraine's identity was not sufficiently deep or distinct to justify its existence as an independent nation-state, but because the forum created space for arguments and frameworks that the West has too often relegated to the margins. For many in the Western establishment, Antalya offered a glimpse of a world viewed through the looking glass.

It would be easy to dismiss Antalya as a gathering of anti-Western, authoritarian populists. After all, one could highlight the gap between the Forum’s stated mission – “to inspire dialogue to redefine the role and core principles of diplomacy in an increasingly polarised atmosphere” – and the often contradictory practices of its key participants. But in the wake of Guantanamo and Gaza, in my opinion the moral authority of the West has all but collapsed. So when Western media rightly and passionately condemn the arrest of journalists in one place but remain taciturn in the face of the systemic killing of journalists in another, it appears to many at the Forum that racism has succeeded in undermining not only principles but even professional solidarity.

The unravelling of the rules-based order is not only a geo-economic phenomenon – marked by the emergence of China as the world’s largest economy, a position not held by a non-Western nation for nearly 200 years – but also one with profound cultural and moral dimensions. As was pointed out at the forum, even commentators nostalgic for the European Enlightenment forget Voltaire when condemning anti-genocide and pro-Palestinian protests.

The Antalya Diplomacy Forum was a platform for stress-testing the moral and intellectual scaffolding of the liberal-democratic world order. The triumph of liberal democracy in the Cold War removed the possibility of imagining better worlds, consigning us to a common sense of a permanent present managed by “tech bros”.

Common sense is not something naturally given but historically formed. It rests on the distillation of beliefs and values that have materialised in everyday life. For example, forty years ago, racial abuse hurled at Black elite footballers was routinely dismissed as banter. Now, there are no significant voices that proudly proclaim they are racist. We live in a time when racism persists – as demonstrated by report after report, testimony after testimony, investigation after investigation—but racists do not exist. Apparently, the end of history did not entail the end of racism.

In Antalya, there was a palpable sense that mass deaths and violence in Gaza – and the complicity of so many Western institutions in aiding and abetting it – has done much to undermine the possibility of a common sense characterised by responsibility, humility and the pursuit of justice. Under the stilted language of diplomatic exchange, there is an implicit but growing belief that not only is the centre of the world shifting, but that the received wisdom we possess is no longer adequate to help us navigate the concatenation of crises the world faces.

This shift in common sense is perhaps the most unsettling and, at the same time, the most hopeful aspect of a diplomatic forum in which the Global Majority is no longer consigned to the margins. We are often told that if the centre cannot hold, truth itself splinters – and without the truths of shared common sense, meaningful dialogue becomes elusive, if not impossible. What Antalya gestures towards is not a restoration of a liberal-democratic moral authority centred on the West, but the building of a new common sense.

This is the wicked problem that lurked beneath the ADF deliberations. Antalya was not another Bandung – the 1955 conference which sought to oppose colonialism or neocolonialism by any nation; a symbol of anticolonial delinking from a world dominated by two superpowers armed with explicit ideologies and mutually assured destruction.

Yet, among many of the participants present in Antalya, there was at least a tacit acknowledgement that the normalisation of genocide threatens not only the Palestinian people but also dehumanises us all – as we remain haunted by the fundamental question: What is to be done?

Salman Sayyid is Professor of Rhetoric and Decolonial Thought at the University of Leeds and Head of the School of Sociology and Social Policy