While analysing the asynchronous development of the world, this article focuses on the role of external challenges (military–political pressure and demonstration effect) in the modernisation of societies. By bringing together Arnold Toynbee’s challenge-and-response concept and Charles Kindleberger’s economic primacy paradigm, it presents the notion of a vanguard society, which programmes and shapes basic parameters of modernisation for the catching up nations (the rest). Although with the collapse of Soviet–American bipolarity and the subsequent disintegration of Pax Americana, the architecture of the modern world has become more complex, the desire to gain the status of avant-garde society still informs the complex polymorphic image of the continuously changing oikoumene. In the new, shrinking world, external challenges have become central factors of development.

This article was prepared with the support of a grant from the Russian Science Foundation. Project number 14-28-00097 “Optimisation of Russian External Investment Relations amid worsening relations with the EU”. It was fi rst published in Russian in the journal Mirovaja Jekonomika i Mezhdunarodnye Otnoshenija (World Economy and International Relations), vol 63, no 11, November 2019, pp. 84–94.