For many years, the global “rules-based order” was presented as a benign system of global governance established by the West. True, its origins went back to the colonial world and many of its systems reflected colonial racial inequalities, but it was held up as the harbinger of global prosperity and order. In it, the West had magically transformed from a colonial villain to a saviour.
But for much of the Global South, the era looked very different. It was experienced as genocide, plunder and displacement. Across Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, colonial administrations disrupted and suppressed local systems and industries, engineered cash-crop economies vulnerable to global price shocks, and redrew political authority to prioritise imperial control.
Eventually, demands grew for a more accurate accounting of the catastrophe the West inflicted on the rest, for acknowledgment of its historic crimes from extermination to enslavement, and for recompense. That coincided with a reordering of global power that left the West increasingly unsure of itself – no longer the saviours of us, the good guys of history they had long pretended to be.
There was some mealy-mouthed acknowledgment of this. In Kenya’s case, revelations of the existence of British torture camps during the 1950s fight for independence produced expressions of regret without apology from the British government, and penny-pinching compensation.
Similarly, Germany accepted that it committed a genocide against the Ovaherero and Nama peoples in Namibia in the first decade of the 20th century, but continues to refuse to pay any compensation, instead offering $1.3bn to be paid through aid programmes out over 30 years as “a gesture of reconciliation”.
These were just crumbs, but marked an important turning point. Movements around the world from Black Lives Matter in the United States to Rhodes Must Fall in South Africa pushed to reconstruct historical narratives about white supremacy and Western domination. Critical anti-colonial thought and discourse spilled from academia into popular culture.
But the backlash came soon enough. In some quarters, there was outright rejection of “white guilt”, which was picked up by politicians and included in political campaigns. Colonial revisionism proved popular and electable. It has also quickly made it to international forums.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s recent speech at the Munich Security Conference is a case in point. He spoke of the pre-1945 imperial order with praise. For him, it was a time when “the West had been expanding – its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe.”
Rubio framed Western dominance as an era of prosperity and moral leadership, arguing that the West should not be ashamed of its past. Colonialism, in this telling, was not racial hierarchy and extraction but stewardship, order, and civilisation. Its decline, implicitly, is something to regret.
What Rubio and the likes of him are calling for is for the West to fully embrace its role as the villain. Not rhetorically, of course – bad guys rarely proclaim themselves as such – but practically, by rehabilitating empire and abandoning guilt and shame for historical wrongs. They see historical reckoning as weakness, even self-hatred. And rather than address the wrongs of the past, they propose to use power to suppress remembrance.
This is a clear attempt at redemption through the conquest of memory. This is not about merely debating the past. It is about shaping the moral vocabulary of the present. It is also about moving away from the current “rules-based order” and towards a reality where there are no rules for “might makes right”.
If empire is benevolent, then contemporary hierarchies can be reframed as responsible leadership. Unequal trade regimes become stability. Military pressure becomes guardianship. Interventions become stewardship. Colonialism, as we have seen in the case of US President Donald Trump’s so-called “Board of Peace”, is rebranded not as domination, but as necessary order and a prelude to prosperity. Multipolarity is framed not as structural adjustment, but as destabilising decline.
This is politically useful in a moment when Western dominance faces challenges from rising powers and shifting alliances. Nostalgia for uncontested supremacy offers clarity and replaces discomfort with pride. It transforms demands for justice into accusations of ingratitude. And its grammar mirrors the familiar pattern. Empire harms but ultimately saves. It errs but redeems itself. Its centrality remains unquestioned.
There is no need for structural reckoning or restitution. The focus shifts from the material consequences of colonial rule to the emotional burden of Western shame. The story becomes about restoring confidence rather than confronting inequality.
Rubio’s speech was meant for a Western audience, but for the rest of us, it should set off alarm bells. It is tempting to treat such rhetoric as the moral failing of a few bad men – easily caricatured and just as easily ignored. That would be a grave error.
We must recognise that they are reconstituting the architecture of colonialism: a legal, economic and epistemic system designed to privilege Western interests, its oppression codified in law, its dictates enforced through coercion, and its benefits distributed along racial lines.
Thus, the rehabilitation of empire is not nostalgia. It is preparation. It is the construction of a moral framework in which the hierarchies of the present need no justification because the hierarchies of the past have been absolved. And while the past cannot be undone, it can be misremembered.
We have been living with the terrible consequences of doing so in our economies, within our borders and in our bodies, and just as we start to discard the scales from our eyes, there is an attempt to blind us again. We must not acquiesce to the revisionism, but rather actively resist it by speaking our truth, insistently and without apology, until it cannot be drowned out.
Memory is not passive. It is a choice made every day, and the choice belongs to us as much as to anyone.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.