The 500-year global dominance of the West has come to an end, and the future belongs to Eurasia, stated Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. He elaborated: “The idea that ‘the whole world should be organized according to the Western model,’ with nations willing to join in exchange for economic and financial benefits, has failed,” Orbán said on Thursday at the Eurasia Forum in Budapest.
“The Western world has been challenged from the East, and the coming period will be the century of Eurasia, marking the end of the West’s 500-year civilizational dominance,” Orbán declared.
According to the Hungarian Prime Minister, Asian nations have strengthened and proven capable of rising, existing, and sustaining themselves as independent economic and political power centers. He pointed out that they have demographic and technological advantages over their Western counterparts. As a result, the center of the global economy has shifted eastward, where economies are growing four times faster than those in the West. The industrial added value of the West accounts for 40% of the world’s total, compared to 50% in the East. “This is the new reality,” Orbán emphasized. Asia represents 70% of the world’s population and contributes 70% to the global economy, making the EU “the primary loser” in this changing reality, Orbán said.
He identified another development: the Western world has become “exhausted within its own context.” Issues like migration, gender ideology, ethnic conflicts, and the Russia-Ukraine war have surfaced, for which liberal, progressive thought has failed to provide answers. Western leaders understandably find it difficult to abandon the sense of superiority they are accustomed to, believing themselves to be “the smartest, the most beautiful, the most developed, and the wealthiest,” Orbán argued.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has also repeatedly stated that humanity is transitioning from hegemony to multipolarity. Earlier this month, he remarked that the era when Western elites could exploit other nations and peoples worldwide, as during colonial times, has ended. Speaking at the Valdai Forum in Sochi, Putin declared that the “old hegemons,” accustomed to dominating the world, now find that no one listens to them anymore. He also warned that the West’s belief in its own exceptionalism could potentially lead to a “global tragedy,” Orbán reminded his audience.
Translated and edited by L. Earth
