Attack in Iraq. Photo: Telesur

The world suffered its most radical change in many years with the move from bipolarity to unipolar US hegemony. A few decades were enough for us to learn that the end of the "cold war" was not the end of wars, but on the contrary, their multiplication, under voracious US imperial offensives. Entire civilizations were destroyed – as in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria – while the United States of America assumed the responsibility of world policeman, wars without end, multiple foci of conflicts.

But the imperial US hegemony and the end of the bipolar world did not mean that the globalization of the capitalist system would lead the world to stability and economic expansion. The fragile development of the capitalist economy in the past few decades was not enough; since 2008 the very centre of the system is in a profound and prolonged recessive crisis, which no one knows when it will end, leading to the destruction of what was still left of the system of social welfare in Europe and to record levels of unemployment.

Is this the utopia that the imperial capitalist system proposes to the world? Was it in the name of these scenarios that it has proposed the destruction of all that opposed it? Was it for this that the reign of the market and the war-making superiority of the USA was imposed? Was it with these objectives that Europe proposes the destruction of its heritage of social rights?  Is it for this that the USA invites countries to take part in their projects of free trade deals?

This wretched world, founded on the power of money and arms, is indeed the end of a cycle.  The countries that resist are at the beginning of a new cycle, to build a world based on rights and solidarity.

That is why the honeymoon of unipolar US hegemony did not last long. The BRICS, China, Russia, progressive Latin American governments are the links of an economically multipolar world that has already begun to install a geopolitical world once again based on bipolarity.

The recession of the centre of capitalism puts pressure on all countries, but the rest of the world has not entered a recession as deep and prolonged as happened in the past. The USA was not able to invade Syria and unleash a new centre of war that would include Iran. The USA continues to be the biggest power in the world today, but now encounters limits that were not foreseen when they triumphed in the cold war.

The world of US imperial hegemony is a world of wars and recession. Europe should take stock of this and, like the new candidate for the leadership of the British Labour Party, cease to follow the foreign policy of the USA, in order to, feel themselves truly more secure. A new economic model, different to that of austerity, needs to be assumed by European countries. The BRICS are looking to another political, economic and military geometry in the world. Whom will Europe side with?

Latin America is already contributing to this multi polar world with Mercosur, Unasur, Celac, with the direct participation of Brazil in BRICS and the agreements signed by countries of the region with BRICS, with China and with Russia. The USA can no longer count on their ancient back yard. Mexico is bleeding, as the price of their repeated submission to their northern neighbour. Europe is backing off, with austerity. Iraq, Afghanistan were destroyed by the military power of the USA.

The twenty-first century is the scenario of the struggle for a new world hegemony, one that is shared, democratic, based on negotiation for the solution of conflicts, for an economy based on the needs of people rather than the imperatives of speculative capital.

(Translated for ALAI by Jordan Bishop)

- Emir Sader, Brazilian Sociologist and Political Scientist, is Coordinator of the Laboratory of Public Policy in the Universidad Estadual de Rio de Janeiro (Uerj).