The mainstream western media and political establishment have always used the term “international community” to refer to the west and its allied international institutions and define democracy as only western liberal democracies. These assumptions are deliberately designed to feed into the ideological arrogance of liberalism, whose supposed triumphalism was preemptively proclaimed in the “end if history” thesis in the last decade of the 20th Century.
The rise of China, a non-western power, is through a modernisation that is deliberately non-liberal. Setting off, on non-liberal path to modernisation, China has achieved within a generation of less than five decades what it took liberal democracies in the west nearly two centuries to accomplish. Moreover, the conflict in Ukraine has further exposed the bankruptcy of the claim that the term “international community” is coterminous with the west.
Unable to line-up the global South in their proxy war against Russia in the Ukraine conflict and also to diplomatically isolate Russia on the international stage with many countries of the South insisting on a negotiated settlement that takes into account the security concerns of all parties concerned, the term international is now more diffuse and inclusive.
The idea of the international community is assuming its proper content and context as reference to an inclusive world community of all nations and institutions representative of all and not limited to western clubs such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), European Union (EU), etc.
To the extent of the reality of the international or world community, some international organisations, mostly serving western interest, need to be restructured to reflect genuine global consensus. The International Criminal Court (ICC) is a major institution that currently serves western interests. There is no war in contemporary history that was without justification and fought on completely fabricated falsehood than the Gulf war and the war of the west against Iraq.
America and its NATO alliance claimed that Saddam Hussein of Iraq had stockpile of weapons of mass destruction and no sooner was the destruction of Iraq completed for the evidence to show that Iraq has no such arsenal for the war estimated at $3 trillion with over a million lives. Yet the principal authors of the war, Mr. George Bush and his British counterpart, Mr. Tony Blair, was never invited, indicted or ever stood in the dock at The Hague, the showroom of International Criminal Court.
Recently Mr. Rodrigo Duterte, former Philippines president, has been hauled before the court and the indictment of President Vladimir Putin completed the undisguised fact that the court is a theatre manipulated by the liberal west for obvious ideological and political purpose. Despite that the ICC is ideologically tainted for its liberal designs and deficient in a consensus that would have endowed it with broad legitimacy, it merely acts as a political tool of the west. Recently President Donald Trump’s Washington is walking back on the ideological use of the ICC, for its effrontery to indict Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, executing in cold blood, thousands of Palestinian residents in Gaza, in what he inappropriately called war in Gaza.
The conflict in Ukraine has provided the political cover for the west to unfurl the most and vindictive sanctions against Russia, leaving the Food and Agriculture Organisation to lament how “Western sanctions against Russia, targeting food, mineral fertiliser, logistics and financial settlement make global hunger worst.” Food insecurity has emerged from the earth scorched western sanctions against Russia as a global endemic problem and a critical challenge to countries in the South, and mostly in Africa.
However, what appears evident is the principled positions of countries in the global South to truly defend the multilateral system and build an inclusive global order that is representative of the world community of nations, with broadly participatory governance process.
Despite the targeted sanctions against Russia, a country that is a critical enabler of food supplies and provider of agricultural support materials, Moscow has been largely undaunted in her commitment to support measures aimed at food security in Africa.
The system of international laws, rules, conventions and institutions that defines the international or world community is undergoing profound changes for inclusivity and this trend, most evident in the evolving multilateral order, represents a dynamic consensus beyond the ideological claim of the west to the exclusive ownership of “international community”.