Right versus Left in a deeply polarised world

Italian Prime Minister (PM) Giorgia Meloni has set the cat among the pigeons by floating a global right-wing alliance which is coalescing to counter Leftist political ideas and movements worldwide.

- Sreeram Chaulia

Her criticism of left-liberals for hypocrisy, double standards and frustration "because conservatives are winning" and "conservatives are now collaborating globally", and her clubbing of American President Donald Trump, Argentinian President Javier Milei, Indian PM Narendra Modi and herself as part of a coalition that is turning the tables on the "global Leftist liberal network", have brought questions of ideological contestation in international affairs to the forefront.

After the ideological tussle of the Cold War between Western capitalism and Soviet Communism ended with the victory of the former in 1991, the American scholar Francis Fukuyama had famously declared "the end-point of mankind's ideological evolution" and the "universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government". As the post-Cold War order unravelled over the next two decades, it became evident that history had not ended and that it was resuming its usual pattern of division and strife among competing ideological models and templates.

The biggest setback to the liberal international order under unipolar American leadership came with the rapid ascent of China to great power status. The manner in which an authoritarian State practising "capitalism with Chinese characteristics" ensconced itself in the centre of economic globalisation and grew to challenge the US over the past two decades eroded the triumphalism of liberals and provided an alternative model for emulation in the developing world.