In our new world disorder, the old bipolar frames of reference won’t get us anywhere | Timothy Garton Ash

Now, a country can be aligned with the US on security while cosying up to Russia on energy and China on trade

As the leaders of the world’s two superpowers, the US and China, hold a summit meeting in San Francisco, many observers hark back to grand bipolar simplicities. A new cold war! The west versus the rest! Democracy versus autocracy! Let’s woo the global south! But the great Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt warned us always to beware of the terribles simplificateurs, the frightful simplifiers. The beginning of wisdom is to understand that we now live in a world fragmented between multiple great and middle powers who do not divide simply into two camps.

The results of an ambitious round of global polling, released today, help us to understand this new world disorder. Conducted for the European Council on Foreign Relations and an Oxford University research project on Europe in a Changing World that I co-direct, this is the second time we have surveyed what we call in shorthand the Citrus countries: China, India, Turkey, Russia and the United States. This autumn we added to them five other major non-European countries – Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, South Africa, Brazil and South Korea – as well as covering 11 European countries.

Timothy Garton Ash is a Guardian columnist

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