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Dena Freeman is a Distinguished Professor of Global Studies at Shanghai University and a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her work centres on global critical theory and the dynamics of progressive social change.

In issue #184 of The Internationalist we excerpt from her introduction in The Global Left in a Multipolar World. Here she explains how despite sharing similar economic nationalist and authoritarian policies across North and South, the global far right is fractured by rival imperial ambitions—offering the left an opening to build a genuine alternative.

In the current context of the decline of many national lefts and the ascent of a reactionary far right, alongside increased geopolitical tensions, an evolving global climate crisis and worldwide erosions of democracy, the task of opening up new vistas of left thought and practice seems phenomenally important. Central to this task is expanding the scale and focus of left analysis from the national level to the global.

However, transposing the concepts of left and right from the national level to the global level is not immediately straightforward. While the twentieth-century national left focussed on a fairly linear struggle between labour and capital within the confines of the nation state, the emerging twenty-first-century global left must focus on a much more complex and multidimensional struggle, articulated at various scales, and combining struggles regarding the critical four elements of contemporary left thought and practice – namely, class, imperialism, ecology and democracy.

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Global lefts and global rights can be understood as contrasting projects of ‘worldmaking’– seeking to change the political architecture of the world system in order to enable different possible world societies to emerge. In this respect, a global left, or a global right, must be more than the sum of its national or local parts.

In recent years, questions of world order have become central in both academic and political discussions. The debate has often been framed as one between ‘globalists’ and ‘sovereigntists’, with globalists wanting more political power at the global level – emphasising the importance of global governance, multilateralism and ‘globalisation’ in general – and sovereigntists wanting more political power at the state level – emphasising national sovereignty, national cultures and protectionist economic policies. But what this elides is that both the global left and the global right can have globalist or sovereigntist programmes. A ‘globalist global right’ programme would be the project of neoliberal globalisation. A ‘sovereigntist global right’ programme would be the newly emerging project of the globally interconnected far right …

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Understanding the BRICS in a left-right model is indeed complex. I would suggest that on the global level, their project is fundamentally ‘anti-imperialist’, seeking to block or reduce the economic imperialism of the West, and thus – to the extent that it does not tip over into a new form of imperialism – should be seen as part of a progressive ‘sovereigntist global left’. And yet, the domestic policies which enable them to mount this anti-imperialist challenge are largely right wing, emphasising nationalist capitalism (or economic nationalism), authoritarianism and the hyper-exploitation of labour. These policies would suggest that they should be seen as part of the authoritarian ‘sovereigntist global right’. It is this combination of left and right policies at different scales that makes the BRICS both effective and also difficult to interpret. Nonetheless, with its novel mixture of left and right, the sovereigntist BRICS project has been the most effective counter-force to respond to the ‘globalist global right’ project of neoliberal globalisation.

In turn, however, the BRICS project catalysed a new counter-force against it. This, I suggest, is the way that the rise of the ‘sovereigntist global right’ in the global North should be understood. The success of the BRICS countries in wrestling control over more of the surplus value extracted from ‘their’ labour, and also from labour located elsewhere, led to a ‘crisis of accumulation’ for capitalist elites in the North as they witnessed an associated decline in their rates of capital accumulation. In response to this core problem, they sought a new solution. Their solution, and associated political programme, I suggest, was to try to compete with the BRICS by copying many aspects of their economic nationalist policies.

The similarities of their policies to those of the BRICS governments can be clearly seen from several recent analyses of sovereigntist New Right economic policies that all point towards a similar picture of authoritarian governments seeking to cement coalitions between dominant economic interests and local systems of power in order to further the interests of national capitalists in their competition with foreign business (Bourgeron 2025, Geva 2021, Şahin and Erol 2021, Scheiring 2021). And, as in the BRICS, a key element of this is increased state involvement in the economy. There has been a well-documented ‘return of industrial policy’ and in recent months the second Trump administration in the US has gone so far as to take control or ownership of several key corporations – taking equity stakes in Intel, a ‘golden share’ in US Steel, and profit-sharing arrangements with Nvidia and AMD – leading some commentators to describe this as “nationalization by stealth” (Khalid 2025) or a new form of “state capitalism” (Dodge 2025). In a similar vein, an initial assessment of the financial strategies of the sovereigntist New Right across the global North comes to the conclusion that there is a coherent project of “State Authoritarian Capitalism” in which the New Right seek “to reassert state control over capital accumulation” in order to increase the competitiveness of national capital within the global economy and to facilitate the national accumulation of capital (Rademacher 2025).

Across the ‘sovereigntist global right’ then, in both the global North and the global South, there is a convergence of macroeconomic policies focussing on economic nationalism and state-mediated capitalism. Within this overall approach there are, of course, a myriad of differences in policies depending on national context and the different positionalities of states within the global economic and financial system. But all these policies seek to maximise national capital accumulation in an increasingly competitive world order. And all these approaches require, and seek to create, increasingly authoritarian states. Their shared political programme is one of competitive inter-state imperialist capitalism, with, to put it bluntly, each state seeking to extract and control as much surplus value as possible from their local labour, while also trying to extract and control more of the surplus value produced by labour in other countries. Domestically, these economic policies are supported by culturalist policies which promote a hierarchical and moral national society based on ‘traditional values’.

Alongside this convergence in national policies there is also a convergence in global policies. The sovereigntists in the global North and the global South both seek to erode neoliberal institutions of global governance. They both call for the demise or major reform of the ‘liberal international order’ with its supposed universalist structures and project of supra-national integration, and instead propose a much looser ‘multi-polar order’ based on strong states, or ‘civilisational blocs’, with enhanced sovereignty, secure borders and diverse cultures. And thus, the sovereigntist projects of the North and the South, the West and the BRICS, can be seen as elements of one ‘sovereigntist global right’, with similar political, economic and cultural policies, and similar projects of worldmaking.

As in the case of the ‘globalist global right’, this core political programme of the elites is not explained directly to the masses, but rather a political narrative is carefully crafted and communicated in order to win support and legitimacy for this project. Across the ‘sovereigntist global right’ there is a shared meta-narrative into which each country can insert its own specificities.2 This core meta-narrative focusses on decline – the decline of a particular nation, country or region, such as ‘the West’ or the ‘Ottoman Empire’. It then crafts a clear and identifiable enemy who is responsible for this decline and that is the ‘liberal managerial elite’ (and not the ‘capitalist elite’ or the ‘billionaires’) who have constructed the ‘liberal international order’ and reap all the benefits from it, while ‘the people’ – those who are loyal to nation, culture and tradition – have been economically left behind. ‘The people’ are further thought to be under a cultural attack – a feature that is often foregrounded in the narrative – as the liberal elite seek to erode their culture, values and traditions by reducing individuals to ‘economic maximisers’, replacing values and morality with laissez-faire hedonism, and by implementing policies which foster cultural hybridisation, with migrants or minorities – seen as secondary enemies – coming to dilute the previously homogenous ‘nation’ and thus further leading to its decline. And finally, the narrative offers a vision for a transformed and better future when ‘the nation will be great again’ and a multi-scalar political programme for how to get there.

However, as should be clear, across the global North and South, the project of the ‘sovereigntist global right’ suffers from many contradictions and false promises. Instead of supporting the working classes and making them, and their nation, ‘great again’, it augurs increasing exploitation of the lower strata of the working classes to the point where there is a crisis of social reproduction, heightening geopolitical tensions to the point where war again seems likely, worsening climate crisis to the point that the future survivability of humans on this planet is in question, and severely eroding and undermining democracy to the point that freedom, justice and participation in society may become distant memories.

There are also vast divisions within the ‘sovereigntist global right’ and it is far from being a unified political force. While its proponents are united in their opposition to the ‘globalist global right’ project of neoliberal globalisation and the liberal economic order, they oppose each other in a new struggle for power and capital between the West and the BRICS. The sovereigntist right in the US seeks to re-assert US hegemony in a new form – as a dominant economic and cultural bloc that relies on sheer power and force, rather than international institutions and international rules, to assert its hegemony. And the sovereigntist project of the BRICS countries seeks the demise of US hegemony in any form and the shift towards a world system of more equal regional blocs in which they will stand as equals alongside, or in opposition to, the US. Thus, despite the similarity of policies and narratives, there is no politically unified ‘sovereigntist global right’, no ‘Far Right International’, but rather complex and paradoxical arrangements and alignments between and across competing political projects. The ‘sovereigntist global right’, then, is not only divisive, but also divided and politically incoherent.

Understanding these contradictions and divisions is important for the global left as it works to craft its response. At present, there is a tendency for much of the left to be so shocked by the rise of the ‘sovereigntist global right’, with its authoritarian, and in some cases even fascist, tendencies, that it automatically sides with the ‘globalist global right’ against it, in a kind of knee-jerk reaction. This short-sighted response leaves much of the left supporting the neoliberal project of global capitalism, liberal international order and US hegemony – which it has long opposed – against what it sees as an even worse enemy. Instead, the left needs to craft a clear and alternative left response. And to be effective, it needs a clear problem analysis regarding the current world situation, a vision of a better alternative, and a political programme for how to get there.

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The most important challenge facing humanity at the moment is the ecological crisis and particularly the crisis of climate change. This is an urgent matter of survival and thus, as the chapters by Therborn, Fernandes and Pedersen remind us, an approach to tackling the current ecological-climate crisis must be a central part of any kind of contemporary global left thinking and strategy. And yet the authoritarian multipolarity and inter-imperial competition that emerges from the currently ascendant political programme of the ‘sovereigntist global right’ makes it increasingly difficult to deal with this problem. However, the North-South dynamics that underly this competition represent a legitimate and progressive attempt by larger states from the global South to counter the economic imperialism of the global North and the unipolar hegemony of the United States. As Therborn suggests in his chapter, a global left should clearly prefer a pluralistic world of peace and cooperation over one of hegemonic domination. And therefore a major task of the left should be to facilitate a “peaceful abdication of the West from the throne of world domination” (Therborn, p. 47). The aim should be not to move from one imperialist world order to another, with a different state or group of states in the imperial role, but rather, I suggest, from an imperial world order to a non-imperial world order which would balance out the global economic system, diffuse competition between the North and South, and therefore also enable both increased national class compromise and a globally focussed joint action to tackle the climate-ecological crisis. What might that look like?

Excerpted with permission from The Global Left in a Multipolar World: Towards a Planetary Politics of Justice and Survival, edited By Dena Freeman and published by Routledge in 2026. 

The Open Access version of this book has been made available under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license. It can be downloaded at 

https://www.routledge.com/The-Global-Left-in-a-Multipolar-World-Towards-a-Planetary-Politics-of-Justice-and-Survival/Freeman/p/book/9781032733883

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