Conclusion: Many Worlds and the Coming Narrative Dilemma
Résumé
While fighting Russia’s aggression in 2022, Ukraine embraced an idealistic, post-1989, narrative of liberal international order, which has been in fact increasingly contested within the Western societies that originally promoted it. Since the end of the Cold War, the priority given to efficient global governance has come at the gradual expense of liberal political standards such as democratic norms, and the moral thickness of the liberal international narrative has consequently diminished. And while the narrators of liberal internationalism have been struggling with both internal and external challenges, other narratives of the global have emerged. The rise of non-Western civilizational narratives in China, India, and Russia, among others, expresses both a demand for pluralism on the international scene and resentment addressed to various degrees to a monolithic representation of the West. The coexistence of the still dominant liberal international narrative with more and more powerful civilizational narratives challenges the notion of a functioning meta-narrative for global cooperation.