The year 2023 ends with good news and bad news for the West. The good news is that it still exists, three decades after the end of the Cold War, and has even come together thanks to Vladimir Putin. The bad news is that it is as contested as ever.

Where is this opposition coming from? Just about everywhere. For the sake of simplicity, experts and commentators use the expression "Global South" to describe all those who refute the view of current international crises by the United States and its European allies, joined by several democracies in Asia and the Pacific, such as Japan, South Korea and Australia.

Two major conflicts highlighted the emergence of the Global South as a geopolitical disrupter. Firstly, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which the West immediately identified as an act of aggression and which called into question the entire international order, without managing to convince any part of the rest of the world. Then there was the war between Israel and Hamas, which considerably aggravated this divide. Yesterday's prosecutors, the West now finds itself on the stand. These two conflicts took place in a fertile breeding ground of resentment toward the rich countries of the North, that of the Covid-19 pandemic, when these countries had initially kept to themselves the vaccines they had invented.

The international order that the West wants to defend in Ukraine is the one it built: an order based on the rule of law. The Soviet Union and its heir, Russia, as well as China, have accepted this and are permanent members of the UN Security Council.

'The West and the rest'

From the moment that one of the guarantor powers of this order, Russia, violated it, without China, another guarantor power, condemning it, the West found itself challenged. And with it, this order based on law, which is perceived as "a code of the West, by the West, for the West," writes researcher Bobo Lo in a text published by the Lowy Institute in Sydney, Australia.

The massive and indiscriminate nature of Israel's response to the terrorist attacks perpetrated by Hamas on October 7 further underlines this. Washington's inability to control Benjamin Netanyahu's excessive attacks further reinforces the idea of an international order that serves Western interests above all else. The polite disdain shown by some in the Global South for the West's demand for solidarity on Ukraine has now turned to indignation.

So who is a part of this Global South? The expression, coined in 1969 by Carl Oglesby, an opponent of the war in Vietnam, satisfies no one as it is such a catch-all term and places in the South countries that are in the North. For want of a better term, however, it has become omnipresent. Even if vague, it has the merit of characterizing a certain ambition on the part of the countries concerned. This is in contrast to previous expressions, "the rest," in the "The West and the rest," dear to the Singaporean diplomat Kishore Mahbubani, which is defined only by its non-membership of the West.

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