The Old Order must fall

For some weeks now, Russia has been spreading a perfidious narrative in the world: it is an ally of the oppressed Global South and is waging an anti-colonial struggle against the West. Yet Russia - like the Soviet Union later - was and is a major colonial power that helped build the Old Order of the 20th century.

The Russian continental conquests from 1547 onwards, from the Baltic to Ukraine, the Caucasus and Central Asia, are in no way inferior to European overseas colonialism. At the height of the Old Order in the late 1950s the balance of terror from East and West - or rather the Global North - almost completely dominated the South. 

And it was the incipient disintegration of the colonial order beginning in the 1960s, decolonization under the sign of the Cold War, that even more escalated the East-West proxy wars. Without question, the West, the U.S. in particular, committed horrible crimes and betrayed its own values many times over - but the Soviet Union was no better in this regard; despite socialist liberation rhetoric, it too pursued its merciless politics of power and influence.

In the 21st century, the colonialism of the North must now end once and for all; the Old Order - fossil, national, colonial - must fall. A new era has dawned: digital globalization and climate crisis are forcing a historic upheaval, calling for a united world capable of action. The old hierarchy of nation states however - America and Russia First - is leading us back, with violence and terror to a past that has long ago ceased to exist.

It is high time for a new alliance of the once oppressed, a future climate and democracy club will be decisively led by the decolonized. By the young democracies of the Global South, but also by the equally young European Union, the vast majority of whose states were also once oppressed. Law instead of power, transnational integration instead of isolationist division - here the "small" states are network winners, the large ones network losers, which by the way perfectly explains the reactionary and anti-globalist forces in the former empires (France, UK, USA, Russia).

The West must end and with it its Old Order. We should not be afraid of it anymore, the old Industrial Order was never social, just or safe - it was only a colonial compromise, a segregative middle class society, a white welfare state at the expense of the Global South.

Fighting for a new order - sustainable, globalist, inclusive - will take years and decades, but it will succeed. Only in this way will freedom, security and justice for all people ultimately become possible. Ukraine is already fighting for this future today, and we must join them - for all of the oppressed and against the historic oppressor Russia.