Variety of possible centers of force in the new world order

The article is devoted to the typology of potential centers of power of the new world order. It is shown that it is too early to write off classical political-geographical and geopolitical concepts into the archive - in particular, the population, the size of the territory (with its saturation with natural resources), the volume of GDP (including when calculating the purchasing power parities of currencies) still determine the weight of countries on the world stage. Despite the development of institutions of multilateral regulation of international relations and certain successes of some regional integration projects, the place of states in the transforming world order is largely determined by their veto power in the UN Security Council, the arsenal of nuclear weapons, proliferation in the world and the general status of their state language. We have identified a little more than two dozen possible centers of power, grouped into four types: (1) Superpowers of disappeared bipolar world (USA and Russia are the two developed countries with sufficient military and political tools and large-scale population, territory and national economies to demonstrate the obvious claim to the promotion of a new global cultural and ideological project); (2) Giants of the East (China and India in some respects are surpassing the United States and Russia, but yet related to economically developing countries and inferior to the first two, especially India, for foreign weight); (3) Major advanced countries (Japan, Germany, France, UK, Italy, Spain); (4) Rising regional powers (Indonesia, Brazil, Turkey and others). The composition of the types, especially the most numerous fourth, is quite controversial, which is shown in detail in the article. In particular, an explanation is given why states such as Canada, Australia, the Republic of Korea or Bangladesh cannot be considered as possible centers of power of the new world order, even conditionally “second echelon”.

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