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Although Russia's war in Ukraine has united the West, it also revealed a fragmentation of the global order, a new survey has found.
The poll, conducted by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), surveyed opinions in nine EU member states, including France, Germany and Poland, and in Britain and the US, as well as China, Russia, India and Turkey.
The polling, carried out in January 2023, reveals sharp geographical differences in attitudes to war, democracy and the global balance of power, with Russia’s aggression having the potential to be a turning point marking the emergence of a “post-Western” world order, the authors of the study said.
“The paradox of the Ukraine war is that the west is both more united and less influential in the world than ever before,” Mark Leonard, ECFR director and a co-author of the report, said based on the findings.
“While most of Europeans and Americans live in a pre-Cold War world, structured by the confrontation of democracy and authoritarianism, many outside the West live in a post-colonial world fixated on the idea of national sovereignty," Timothy Garton Ash, co-author of the study, said.However, the West had “utterly failed to persuade major powers of the rest, such as China, India and Turkey”.
“We urgently need a new narrative that is actually persuasive to countries like India, the world’s largest democracy," he said.
The survey showed Western views of Russia had also hardened in the past year.
Large majorities in the UK (77%), the US (71%) and the nine EU member states (65%) regarded Russia as an “adversary”, with which their country was in conflict, or in competition as a “rival”.
On the other hand, just 14% in the US, 15% in the nine EU states surveyed and 8% in Britain viewed Russia as an “ally” who shared their interests or a “necessary partner”.
Asked to pick two out of ten proposed descriptions, in the US respectively survey respondents chose “aggressive” (45%) and “untrustworthy” (41%), with 48% and 30% in the nine EU countries and 57% and 49% in the UK.
An average of 55% of respondents across the nine member states favoured continuing sanctions against Moscow even at the expense of economic difficulties.
Large numbers of people in China (76%), India (77%) and Turkey (73%), for example, said they felt Russia was “stronger” or “as strong” than before the war started almost one year ago.
They saw Moscow as a strategic “ally” and “necessary partner” of their country (79%, 79%, 69%).
Respondents from outside the West possess a clear preference for the war to end as soon as possible, even if it means Ukraine would have to give up (parts of) its territory.
Similarly, many more (41% in China, 48% in Turkey and 54% in India) wanted the war to end as soon as possible, even if that meant Ukraine giving up its occupied territory, while just 23%, 27%, and 30% thought Ukraine should regain its land even at the cost of a longer conflict.
The active Western involvement evokes scepticism outside the West, as the appeals of “defending democracy”, do not find enough credibility in other countries.
The survey shows that every non-Western nation considers its own democracy to be the best-functioning democracy: in China, 77% of people answered China is the “real democracy”, 57% in India think it’s India and 36% in Turkey respectively.
“Many people in the West see the coming international order as the return of a cold war-type bipolarity between West and East, democracy and authoritarianism,” the study’s authors said but added that people in those countries would see themselves very differently.
The West will have to live with “hostile dictatorships such as China and Russia”, but also with independent powers such as India and Turkey, the authors stated.
These do not “represent some new third bloc” or even share a common ideology, but nor are they “content to adjust to the whims and plans of the superpowers”, they added.
Instead of expecting them to support “Western efforts to defend the fading post-Cold War order, we need to be ready to partner with them in building a new one," the study's authors concluded.
[Edited by Alexandra Brzozowski/Alice Taylor]
