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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Fifteen years ago, Dominique Moïsi famously argued that the world was increasingly shaped by a ‘clash of emotions’ as the old politics of ideology faded. Asia was hopeful; the West was fearful; and much of the rest of the world felt humiliated. Moïsi warned that this was a dangerously unpredictable world, that authorities had a responsibility to keep tempers cool. In this bold new book, Moïsi reports that they have failed: We live in a world where emotions have triumphed.
One of the world’s most influential analysts of international affairs, Moïsi explains how and why the problems he identified in his path-breaking The Geopolitics of Emotion have deepened. More insidious emotions have been provoked by the rise of nationalism and populism, the retreat from globalization, the acceleration of climate change, and the dark sides of information technology. Raw emotions such as anger and even hatred have triumphed both in international and domestic politics—evident not just in leaders’ extreme rhetoric but now in open war in Ukraine. Against the backdrop of the US-China rivalry, a new Tripolar Order is emerging, featuring hope and resentment in the Global South, humiliation and anger in the Global East, and fear and resilience in the Global West.
The Triumph of Emotions is an illuminating and passionately argued book for our fraught times.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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CONTENTS
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Fear has prevailed over hope
Between a bipolar and a tripolar world
Globalization and interdependence
1 War in Ukraine and the Emotional Divorce of the World
War as a game changer
Tell me what you think of the war; I will tell you who you are
War is for “others”
Between apprehension, indifference, and Schadenfreude; or how the Global South faces the war in Ukraine
The sources of Putin’s conduct
The alibi of NATO enlargement
The weaponization of humiliation
The empire of lies
What should the West’s answer be?
To conclude
2 The Emergence of the Global South
A surreal interview
What is the Global South today?
The West has mismanaged the world
The underrepresentation of the Global South
Can the Global South save the UN?
A period of transition between two worlds
Israel in between two worlds
From the Third World to the Global South
From the nonaligned movement to the Global South
India: the potential rise of a new giant
The Global South beyond India
Africa: the forgotten continent
Latin America still continues to disappoint
3 The Hardening of the Global East
A tough and revealing debate in Singapore
The rise of the Global East
China’s uncertain return to primacy
Russia’s path toward chaos
Religious despotism: the case of Iran
4 The Global West between Polarization and Resilience
What is the Global West?
America’s democratic challenges: from the land of hope and glory to the land of fear and worry
The crisis of the European West
The singular case of Poland
The Asian West
Israel: the Middle Eastern West or the West in the Middle East
Conclusion
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction
Begin Reading
Conclusion
Index
End User License Agreement
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The Triumph of Emotions
Geopolitics in an Age of Resentment, Anger and Fear
DOMINIQUE MOÏSI
polity
Copyright © Dominique Moïsi 2025
The right of Dominique Moïsi to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2025 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5977-0
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024946644
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Introduction
In my book The Geopolitics of Emotions: How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation and Hope Are Reshaping the World, published in 2009, I attempted to draw a mapping of the emotions of the world. I was convinced that in order to understand our changing geopolitical environment, we had to decipher the leading emotions behind our cultural differences. I found more hope in Asia, following the economic growth of China and India. I perceived more humiliation in the Arab/Muslim world in the aftermath of the war in Iraq, and the second Intifada in Israel. And I saw more fear of the present and the future in the Western world, in both the United States and Europe.
There existed, of course, hard cases, countries that were not dominated by one emotion, but reflected a balance among them. For example, Russia, Iran, and Israel all displayed more than their share of fear, humiliation, and hope. The African continent oscillated between despair and hope, while Latin America navigated between demagogy and progress.
My ambition in this new book is to revisit the world through the same lenses, through the prism of emotions. I wish to explain how and why the problems I identified in The Geopolitics of Emotion have deepened and worsened. Why have emotions triumphed? In the concluding chapter of that 2009 book, “The World in 2025,” I engaged in an exercise of historical fiction aimed at developing citizen reflexes. What would the world look like if fear were to come to dominate it, or, conversely, if hope were to rule?
Fear has prevailed over hope
We have now reached 2025. And the verdict of history is crystal clear: fear has prevailed over hope and the world today is much closer to the worst-case scenario that I had imagined than it is to the best-case vision I had dreamt of. I was realistic enough in 2009 to know that the hopeful scenario was just a dream, that could never really materialize. But I was idealistic enough to consider my Cassandra predictions as a wake-up call, a cautionary tale of a future doomed never to occur. And, to be fair, it did not. But with the return of war in Europe, the risks of an extension of war in the Middle East, the rise of nationalism and populism around the world, the retreat from globalization, the tragic acceleration of climate change, and the dark side of information technology revolutions, not to forget the immense potential consequences of AI (artificial intelligence), negative emotions have not only clearly triumphed over positive ones, they have also multiplied and diversified – some might be tempted to say they have exploded. To understand the world today, you have to add to humiliation and fear such raw emotions as anger and resentment, if not rage and even hatred. As a result, the new emotional order of the world is not only darker, as in the last paintings Van Gogh did at Auvers-sur-Oise in the months that preceded his suicide; it is also more complex, and much less defined by geography than was the case in 2009. And there have been major differences. In Asia for example, hope is far more manifest today in India than it is in China, with the rising demographic of the former in contrast to the slowing economy (and demographic) of the latter. With the explosion of Chinese nationalism in the region, if not in the world, an Asian West has emerged that is even more evident than it was in the early 2000s, encompassing countries such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. These three countries may be geographically in Asia, but in strategic and emotional terms, they now perceive themselves as integral parts of the West. Their soft power is essentially Western. In the Middle East, hope is no longer confined to the confetti of history incarnated by the Emirati kingdoms. Under the heavy hand of Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), Saudi Arabia is experiencing a not-so-tranquil revolution toward modernity. Israel, on the other hand, while continuing to ignore the plight of the Palestinians – and paying, as we are just seeing, a very high price as a result – is confronted with the deepest identity crisis of its seventy-five years of existence.
One might be tempted to argue provocatively that, if looking for hope, it is more present in Europe, in a country like Ukraine – in spite of the terrible sufferings inflicted upon them by war – than it is in Asia in an empire such as China. Even among the ruins of their cities systematically destroyed by Russian bombs, Ukrainians, led by their charismatic Churchillian-like president Volodymyr Zelensky, remain convinced that, at the end of the day, if the West continues to support them, “David will prevail against Goliath.” Russia’s aggression crystalized their identity, leaving them with only one choice: to belong to the West. By contrast, one finds much less hope in China now than earlier in the century. Economic growth has fallen from above 10 percent to below 5 percent (if not much less, as the construction bankruptcies indicate). COVID-19 caused a collective trauma, and demographic realities have hit home. China is no longer the most populated country in the world.
Furthermore, emotions everywhere are far more “mixed” than they were in 2009. To attempt once more a daring comparison between geopolitics and the world of impressionist paintings, colors have not only darkened, but have lost their dominating tone. Darker shades of gray have progressively replaced lighter ones, even if rays of light pierce through the accumulation of clouds, or briefly replace the explosions of thunder. In October 2023, elections in Poland and the return to power of a pro-European and pro-democracy majority was proof that illiberal democracy can be overcome. And that populism can be resisted and defeated. The leader of the party of moderation and rationality, Donald Tusk, a former prime minister in his own country and a former president of the European Union, managed to mobilize huge crowds, under the motto “Make Poland Decent Again.” These were not his words, but they reflected his message.
Between a bipolar and a tripolar world
These shifts in emotions have accompanied, if not created, deep transformations in the international order (or disorder) of the world. The bipolar order of the Cold War period (1947–89) can be seen in retrospect as artificially simple. Two blocs were facing each other, each one presided over by a single power, the United States on the one hand, the Soviet Union on the other. The two rivals were united by a common fear of nuclear Armageddon, and an understanding of the rules of the balance of terror. To quote French philosopher Raymond Aron, “peace was impossible, war improbable.” Nothing would of course be more misguided than to idealize a period that came so close to apocalypse in October 1962 during the Cuban missile crisis. But the bipolar system of the Cold War period felt, and probably was, much simpler than the multipolar balance of power of Ancien Régime Europe. And the American unipolar moment of the post-Cold War years (between 1991 and 2001, from the fall of the Soviet Empire to the fall of the twin towers in Manhattan) was so short, that it is difficult to derive valid lessons from it.
Today, against the backdrop of US/China rivalry, the war in Ukraine, and conflict in the Middle East, one can read the world in two different, yet not necessarily incompatible, ways. Some will see the return of a bipolar system, with China replacing the Soviet Union in what can be described as an updated version of the Cold War. To plagiarize an old saying, one could say: “It has the color of the Cold War, it has the smell of the Cold War, but it is not the Cold War.” China is a global power, something the Soviet Union never was. And the world needs China, just as much as China needs the world. The Soviet Union was a unidimensional power, a pure object of fear, mostly just a nuisance value in the last decades of its existence. The socialist ideal did not long survive the crimes of Stalin as a source of hope. But what happens when China, your main rival, is also your main trading partner, when the geopolitical rivalry becomes a lose/lose game in the realm of geo-economics?
There is another reading of the world: one that looks especially relevant since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, and even more so since the start of the Israel/Hamas war in the Middle East, that could – if only in the short term – distract the United States from its legitimate fixation both with Asia, and also, to be more precise, with China. Can we say that, beyond the rivalry between China and the United States, a new tripolar order is emerging, between the Global South, the Global East, and the Global West? An order that reflects the new emotional balance of the world, featuring resentment and hope in the Global South, humiliation and anger in the Global East – clearly in Russia, but also in China though on a different scale – and fear and resilience in the Global West? In its very essence, this second reading of the world expresses an inescapable reality. In 1975, Chinwezu, a Nigerian writer educated in the United States, published a punchy essay called “The West and the rest of us.” Today, it would be excessive to describe the Western world as an “endangered species” even if, in demographic terms, it represents little more than 10 percent of the world population. But the West has clearly lost the centrality and primacy it enjoyed for centuries. And “we” Westerners have to face this reality with a combination of humility for what we have become, and ambition and determination for the values for which we continue to stand. Robert Badinter, a former minister of justice for France and a towering European moral figure, said not long before his death: “It is not because our values are no longer consensual that they are not universal.” In 2009, when I wrote The Geopolitics of Emotion, the Western world still enjoyed the illusion that it remained the center of the world. In his bestselling book The Post-American World, published in 2008, the American writer and journalist of Indian descent, Fareed Zakaria, announced the coming of a new power balance. But, for him, America was not in decline; it was the rest of the world, led by China and India, that was catching up with the United States. Today, the West has to face a harsh reality: it is only one of the centers of power and influence in the world; it has lost its monopoly as a model. The Chinese today (the Indians tomorrow?) are proposing alternative global models of political, social, and economic development. In cultural terms, the soft powers of countries such as South Korea and India are noticeably progressing, albeit with a mixture of imitation and competition with the West. In the world of fashion, the African continent has slowly made itself felt with the success of African-born designers, and the popularity of African materials, even in the world of haute couture. And in the world of sports, Saudi Arabia, thanks to its “deep pockets,” is attracting some of the best soccer players in the world.
The world has never been more emotionally diverse precisely at the very moment it is faced with a poly-crisis. A multiplicity of actors and a multiplicity of challenges: an embarrassment of riches of the sort that can so easily lead to a perception or reality of chaos.
Globalization and interdependence
One should not confuse globalization and interdependence. The retreat from globalization may have begun in economic terms several years ago in 2007–8 with the financial and economic crisis: the fall of Lehman Brothers remains as the symbolic equivalent to the fall of the twin towers in Manhattan. But globalization has never been more present in cultural terms. And as far as economics and geopolitics are concerned, the world has become more interdependent. One used to say in the past that when America sneezed, the world caught a cold. The same could be said today of China. And it is hard to ignore the possible consequences of the war in Ukraine for the future of the South China sea. Will Russia’s invasion encourage Beijing to apply force to gain control of Taiwan? Or will it, instead, instill in Chinese elites a sense of prudence that has been lacking since Xi Jinping came to power? The triumph of emotions in 2025 makes one think of geopolitical tectonic plates moving simultaneously in all directions and at an accelerated pace.
But the novelty of our world does not stop there. We must add two other dimensions if we are to understand the depth of the challenges we are collectively facing.
The first one can be described as follows. Geopolitics and politics, the international and domestic realms, are, so to speak, increasingly merging in ways that were unthinkable in 2009. What unites both realms is a common evolution toward emotional fragmentation and polarization. Alongside the multiple revolutions in the world of communication and information, international and domestic politics are negatively reinforcing each other through a process of disinformation and fake news. The United States is a perfect illustration of this point. The West has not only lost its centrality and status with the emergence of a much more complex and balanced world; it has also seen a deep transformation of its image. The central actor of the West, America, has moved from being a model to becoming almost a counter-model. For the demonstrators of Tiananmen Square in Beijing in May 1989, or much closer to us in Hong Kong in the mid-2010s, the Statue of Liberty was still a symbol of hope. The core message of Hollywood’s golden years, “if you can dream it, you can do it,” expressed in such diverse movies as Working Girl and Schindler’s List, incarnated a nearly universal dream. I still remember with the deepest of emotions Frank Capra’s 1930s movies: Mr Deeds Goes to Town and, even more so, Mr Smith Goes to Washington. They were powerful tributes, from an Italian-born director, to the greatness of American democracy during the years of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency. The election of Donald Trump to the US presidency in 2016, and in particular the attempted coup represented by the march on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, have increasingly been seen as a warning, a wake-up call for Western and non-Western democracies alike, on the frailties of their own political systems. It would be an exaggeration to say that America has moved from being the pillar of stability in the world (think of Vietnam, think of Iraq) to becoming the main cause of its destabilization (think of Putin’s Russia). Nevertheless, the “shining city on the hill” is increasingly seen as a prefiguration of everything that can go wrong in a democracy as it moves from being an external hyperpower to being a domestically hyperpolarized society. As if these international and internal complexities were not enough, what is radically new in our present global context is that these geopolitical and political changes are taking place in the shadow of two major evolutions: climate change on the one hand, and AI on the other. Climate change, with its unpredictable speed and depth, makes the encounter between growing geopolitical rivalries and political fragmentation nothing less than a suicidal and gigantic distraction. Why claim a bigger part of the cake (think of Russia), if the cake itself (our planet) is in danger of disappearing? Or if the significant warming of growing regions of our planet makes them no longer habitable under the combined threat of extreme heat, fires, and flooding? How will richer countries deal with climate refugees?
As for AI, it might radically transform not only the nature of war, with drones replacing bombers, and robots eventually replacing soldiers, but, even more frightening, the nature of work and the meaning of life. Why should I live, if “I” can no longer make a difference for myself or for others? Or if it is not the economic crisis that deprives me of my job, but a technological revolution that renders me useless and obsolete? Of course, to be fair, there is a much more positive and humanistic reading of the impact of AI, from its revolutionary use in the world of medicine to its positive impact on the economy and society.
But of all the factors that have changed or simply revealed the new emotional order of the world, the most significant – for Europeans at least – has been the return of war on our continent, barely eighty years after the end of World War II, and taking place at little more than a two-hour flight from Paris.
This is the reason why The Triumph of Emotions will begin with an assessment of the emotional consequences for the world of the war in Ukraine. For this war has accelerated, if not revealed, the emergence of a new emotional divorce in the world.
October 7, 2023 has been sometimes described as the “September 11” of Israel. It may represent something even more significant for the Jewish state. The bloodiest pogrom since the end of World War II questions the Israeli state’s very purpose: the protection of Jews in the world in the aftermath of the Shoah. This act of barbarism in the Middle East, followed by an excessive and ill-advised response on the part of the Israelis, confirms the very thesis of this book concerning the growing weight of emotions in the world. And it echoes the dual thesis I was defending in The Geopolitics of Emotion where I presented the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians not only as the “tragic matrix” of the international system, but as the “archetypal encounter between two primary emotions: humiliation and fear.” A nation has been born out of a unique and absolute tragedy. A people has been crushed and oppressed by a victim rendered blind to the suffering of the “other” and by the immensity of its own physical and psychological wounds.
A leading member of the Palestinian elite once memorably described to me how his people felt: “It is as if you were walking in the streets of the city where you were born and suddenly, above your head, a window opens and someone throws out of that window a human being that crushes you as he touches the ground. The unfortunate passer-by is of course the Palestinian; the person responsible for the defenestration is the European; and his victim, who in turn becomes the oppressor of the Palestinian, is the Israeli Jew.” And he concluded: “Nothing could be more emotional than this tragic encounter taking place on the world stage still dominated by the conflicting guilt of a Western European world torn between the memories of antisemitism and colonialism.” The problem for Israel is that, with the process of time, the first memory (antisemitism) has slowly but irresistibly faded, while the second one (colonialism) has resurfaced with a vengeance. Israel, of course, and particularly its present political leadership, bears a heavy responsibility for this process. It is as if the nationalism of the land, in the manner of a magnifying glass, was emphasizing the “sins” of the victim, to the detriment of the memory of the immensity of his sufferings; and, in the process, was neglecting to mention the exceptional character of his feats, scientific, technological, as well as cultural.
At the emotional level, the consequences – international as well as domestic – of what can be described as Israel’s fifth war easily turn out to be huge, not only for the state of Israel and the Middle East at large, but also for the Jewish people. Israel was their ultimate protection, if not their life insurance. Could it become a source of vulnerability, even an objective danger?
1War in Ukraine and the Emotional Divorce of the World
War as a game changer
As a baby-boomer, born in France in 1946, right after the end of World War II, I belong to a generation that has never been directly confronted with war. I was too young to serve in the Algerian War and I feel privileged to have escaped the major tragedies of life. It was as if my status as the son of an Auschwitz survivor and the incommensurable sufferings experienced by my father had given me some kind of special protection, if not immunity. (I am of course speaking here as a West European.)
But in the early morning of February 24, 2022, I felt keenly as if the long post-World War II parenthesis of peace had ended. It was as if, after being accustomed to eating the biblical “white bread,” during the first seventy-five years of my life, the time for “black bread” had brutally come. I am fully aware that French psychoanalyst Boris Cyrulnik, who has worked on the concept of resilience, was much more disturbed than I was on that morning. He had miraculously survived World War II and Nazi persecution. Suddenly, long-forgotten or suppressed images and sounds of his youth were resurrected and coming back to haunt him. War was back in Europe. Privileged by my postwar birth status, I had been presumptuous enough to believe that I could and would escape the tragic nature of history. “The Gods” had punished me. But history was catching up with my generation. Of course, I do not forget that, just thirty years earlier, war had already returned to Europe, in the Balkans, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of Tito’s Yugoslavia. But those wars, even though tragic in their own right, never threatened the stability of the world or even the core of Europe. No one ever spoke of the risks of a Third World War and/or of the possible use of nuclear weapons. And the number of casualties in ex-Yugoslavia over nearly a decade did not begin to reach the level of casualties caused by the war in Ukraine in three years (at the time or writing, already more than 200,000).
On the morning of February 24, I felt like an analyst reinforced in the validity of my judgment or, more probably, of my intuition on emotions. I had simply taken at face value the analysis and predictions of the CIA that sounded so plausible and had announced the inevitability of war. It was foolish not to take them seriously. All the signs were there, written on the wall. I still remember a very distinguished member of the French Academy asserting with an air of absolute certainty, just a few days before the first Russian invasion: “Putin will not go to war, he is not stupid.” But if I was reassured as an analyst, I was appalled as a citizen by the tragic absurdity of the event. Confronted with existential challenges such as climate change, or the return of pandemics like COVID-19, an epidemic we were only just beginning to surmount, we should all have felt ourselves to be “in the same boat.” But in strategic and emotional terms, that was clearly not the case.
As I write these lines, the war in Ukraine is still unfolding. All outcomes are possible, from a Russian victory to some kind of stalemate leading to an indeterminate and possibly indefinite truce, like in Korea. But whatever its conclusion, this war will remain a global game changer in geopolitical, if not economic, political, and even cultural terms. Above all, in the field of emotions, the return of war to Europe has both revealed and accelerated the emotional divorce of the world. The war not only separates Europeans from non-Europeans, but also Europeans among themselves, for Russians are also European. It also distinguishes Westerners among themselves, while potentially pitting Americans against Europeans.
Tell me what you think of the war; I will tell you who you are
The war in Ukraine reveals, above all, the emotional divorce that exists between Westerners and non-Westerners. Empathy for the plight of Ukrainians is a product not only of geography and history, but also of political culture. The more democratic your country is, the easier it is for you to relate to the sufferings of the Ukrainians, and to perceive the danger of Russian expansionist adventurism. From this standpoint, Central Europeans rely more on the West’s responses than ever. They not only feel geographically close to Ukraine, they still have in their genes – even indirectly for those born after 1989 – the experience of Soviet occupation. Seeing Russian tanks rushing to seize control of Kyiv evoked for a majority of Central Europeans memories of Budapest in 1956, or Prague in 1968. A “kidnapped Europe” – to use Milan Kundera’s apt and vivid formula – could only “feel” for the Ukrainians. Beyond empathy and a sense of shared destiny, there was also undiluted fear in the Baltic Republics, which were part of the Soviet Union until 1991, as well as in Poland. Poles may have retained in a tiny part of their collective memory a souvenir of their short occupation of Moscow in 1610. They remember much more clearly the three successive divisions of their country between 1772 and 1795 by the Russian and Austrian Empires and the Prussian kingdom; or, more recently, in 1944, the Soviet Army waiting on the other side of the Vistula River during the crushing of the Warsaw insurrection before intervening decisively to take control of the city. Not to mention the Katyn massacres of Polish elites attributed initially to Nazi Germany by the Soviet Army, but, in reality, committed under Stalin’s orders at the outset of the war.
