Poland’s Security Policy in the Emerging Multipolar World Order

Abstract

In the first years after the Cold War, the world order rested on the global hegemony of the USA. Toward the end of the 1990s, things began to change, however. As early as 1999, Samuel Huntington noted that the ‘unipolar moment’, which arrived with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, had passed.¹ At the beginning of the 21st century, the emerging powers were beginning to play increasingly important international roles and were challenging America’s hegemony.² The influence of the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) is growing rapidly. At the beginning of 21st century, the world thus entered the period of a multipolar international order, i.e., one ‘made up of three or more significant powers’.³