The Old World systems were nearly always multipolar, although up to now multipolarity has never been truly general or equal.

Thus, hegemony has always been more an objective pursued by the powerful than an actual reality. When hegemony has existed, it has always been relative and provisional.^[III]

The partners in the multipolar world of the nineteenth century (which contin­ued until 1914) were scarcely anything other than the ‘powers’ of their age.

The multipolar world ushered in by the Russian Revolution, then partly imposed by the Asian and African liberation movements, was of a quite different nature. The conventional analysis of the period after the Second World War, which speaks of it in terms of ‘bipolarity’ and ‘cold war’, does not give due recognition to the advances of the South. My own approach places the multipolarity of the time in the framework of the real clash of civilizations, which, beyond the deform­ing ideological expressions, concerned the conflict between capitalism and its possible overcoming by socialism. Whether or not they had made a socialist revo­lution, the striving of the peoples of the periphery to abolish the effects of polari­zation due to capitalist expansion necessarily inserted itself into an anti-capitalist perspective.

This is why the reading I shall propose here centres on the strong political soli­darity that the conflict between capitalism and socialism inspired, which in turn governed the conceptions of multipolarity peculiar to the second half of the twen­tieth century.

6.1