UPD: The livestream is over. The video of the discussion is available via the same link. Stay tuned!

🎥 LIVE: at 12:00 Moscow Time (GMT+3), the Valdai Club will host a discussion on the topic “National Identity as a Form of Geopolitical Struggle”.

https://vk.com/video-214192832_456239109

#Norms_and_Values #values #geopolitics

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🪩 National and Quasi-National Identity in the Era of Metamodern

On July 21, the Valdai Discussion Club hosted a discussion titled “National Identity as a Form of Geopolitical Struggle”. 

💬 Oleg Barabanov, Programme Director of the Club, who moderated the discussion, invited the participants to discuss the processes of shaping national identity and the possibility of its formatting, as well as the role of society in these processes and the risks associated with them.

💬 Miša Đurković, Director of the Institute for European Studies (Serbia), author of the books “Dark Corridors of Power” and “The Illusion of the European Union”, postulated that we live in a time of unstable identity ideology based on the fact that nothing is permanent, either at the personal or at the national level. Such ideology is in the interests of transnational corporations. The great powers also use this constructivist ideology to their benefit, creating regional and quasi-national identities to counter the geopolitical interests of other states and to change political reality. Đurković considers the actions of the West in Ukraine and a number of historical moments associated with the formation of Croatian, Montenegrin, Bosnian and Albanian identities and with the reform of the Serbian language carried out in the 19th century by the linguist Vuk Karadžić as characteristic examples of such identity construction.

💬 Oleg Bondarenko, Director of the Progressive Policy Foundation, Editor-in-Chief of The Balkanist project, noted that nowadays people of the world, in a sense, live “in different orbits” and therefore different things can be named “national identity” in different regions of the world. At present, in his opinion, it makes more sense to talk about national identity, which has become a political tool of various major geopolitical actors, in terms of “metamodern”, and not in the academic terms of the last century. Speaking of modern Europe, he noted that, despite the proclaimed transhumanist values, it continues to live in the old paradigm of nation-states and its countries actively resist the attempts of their regions to “exercise sovereignty”. This is what prevents Europe from becoming a major geopolitical actor and makes it vulnerable, for example, to the American policy of “divide and conquer”.

https://valdaiclub.com/events/posts/articles/national-and-quasi-national-identity-in-the-era-of-metamodern/

#Norms_and_Values #values #geopolitics

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🌐 The axiom of the Western foreign policy logic is the fundamental impossibility of a just international order.

This conclusion was made by our opponents not from scratch, and not simply from the desire to lay an ideological basis for a world order that meets only their interests. It arose during the course of a historical process, on the basis of the colossal experience of the history of interstate relations in Europe — perhaps the richest one, if we talk about such a geographically localized part of humanity.

Several millennia of turbulent social interaction and interstate clashes have served as such a compelling experience that they now constitute the basis of the political culture of the powers with which Russia historically has been in a state of confrontation.

The reason for this rooted injustice, as all Western science and civilization assures us, is that the balance of power of states is connected with objective factors of a geopolitical nature and therefore will always remain the cause of their inequality. It is impossible to solve this problem and, at best, we can only talk about reducing its negative impact on general security. This logic seems to be extremely reasonable. Moreover, since the mid-20th century, it has been backed up by the factor of nuclear weapons.

The basis of the modern international order is the procedure created by the countries of the West, and the central idea underlying this procedure is the immanent injustice of international politics. Even after Russia succeeds in Ukraine, it would be somewhat naive to expect our adversaries to change their views on the world, since it is tantamount to demanding a change in their philosophy of life, writes Valdai Club Programme Director Timofei Bordachev.

https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/what-is-a-just-international-order/

#Asia_and_Eurasia #WorldOrder #geopolitics

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🌏 Due to its unique geographical and geopolitical location, Central Asia has always been a crossroads for great powers.

Due to the special background of relations between Central Asia and Russia, great power relations for the Central Asian countries are also of particular importance, even with regards to their political security. Therefore, the proper management of great power relations is not only a diplomatic skill for Central Asian countries, but also a way to secure the security and stability of their countries.

All the major powers are active in Central Asia, including China, Russia, the United States, Europe, India and Japan. This would not be a problem for the Central Asian countries if the major powers were on good terms, but the reality is that the relationship between the major powers in Central Asia is complicated, writes Zhao Huasheng.

https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/central-asia-in-change-beyond-the-great-game/

#Asia_and_Eurasia #CentralAsia #geopolitics

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🌏 The history of the 20th and early 21st centuries proves that Eurasia continues to be the centre of global political processes, and that the geopolitical map of the world depends on the alignment of forces on the continent.

Analysing the new borders of the SCO, one involuntarily comes across the idea that they increasingly fit into the geopolitical map of the world conceptualised by the English scientist Halford Mackinder, as described in his works The Geographical Pivot of History (1904) Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919). Today’s contours of the alliance completely cover the territory of the so-called Heartland, which controls the river basins of the Arctic Ocean, as well as the Caspian Sea and the historical Silk trade corridor. However, the announced expansion of the SCO reaches the borders of the “Inner Crescent” — a territory capable of controlling the leading sea routes, including the Suez Canal and the New Suez Canal, which connect the Red and Mediterranean Seas. In other words, the contours of a new macro-region are being formed in the SCO space, with international “North-South” and “East-West” corridors, as well as key water arteries.

The expansion of the SCO towards the Rimland is of strategic importance, as since the Cold War, the American foreign policy strategy towards the Heartland has been to locate US military bases in the Rimland and foster the emergence of loyalist regimes there. Such a policy fits into the “anaconda” plan, which implies the control and strangulation of the Heartland territory. Accordingly, the integration of the Rimland countries into the SCO is the formation of a belt of friendly states, Daria Osinina writes.

https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/sco-new-borders-new-tasks/

#EconomicStatecraft #Rimland #Eurasia #SCO #geopolitics

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🇷🇺🇨🇳🇰🇵 The prerequisites for the resumption of strategic cooperation between Moscow, Pyongyang and Beijing were brewing against the background of the tightening of Washington's policy towards North Korea under the Biden administration, as well as NATO's military deployment in the Indo-Pacific region.

🔹 So, in 2021, the AUKUS bloc (USA, Britain and Australia) was created, which involves the assistance of Washington and London in the appearance of a nuclear submarine fleet in non-nuclear Australia.

🔹 The Quadripartite Security Dialogue QUAD (Australia, India, the USA and Japan) has already been branded as an anti-Chinese NATO; Canada has proposed the creation of a four-way cooperation structure involving South Korea, Japan, and the United States to counter Russia and China.

🔹 There are more and more persistent signals from Seoul and Tokyo that they are not averse to hosting American nuclear weapons or acquiring their own, which, again, would grossly violate the international non-proliferation regime.

In this regard, the visit to Pyongyang by high-ranking officials from Russia and China is as much moral support as it is a clear sign of the revival of the Russian-Chinese-North Korean coalition, designed to effectively counter the escalation of tension on the Korean Peninsula and in the Indo-Pacific region as a whole.

The participation of Russian Minister of Defence Sergey Shoigu in the celebrations in Pyongyang, dedicated to the 70th anniversary of the victory of the Korean people in the Patriotic Liberation War of 1950-1953, was a clear signal to Washington and Seoul about the transformation of Russian policy on the Korean Peninsula in favour of recognizing the DPRK as an important military-political partner, writes an independent analyst Vitaly Sovin.

https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/russia-north-korea-china-reactivation/

#EconomicStatecraft #Russia #China #DPRK #geopolitics

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🧊🌐 Cooperation in the Arctic has been renowned for being largely immune to geopolitics.

Even at times of great power conflict during the Cold War, cooperation in the Arctic continued for mutually beneficial cooperation and trust-building. This era appears to have come to an end.

Over the past two decades, relations between the NATO countries and Russia have continued to deteriorate and the Arctic increasingly becomes the home of competing interests. The decision by the collective West to suspend cooperation with Russia in the Arctic Council over the war in Ukraine suggests that reliable cooperation in the Arctic has likely come to an end.

As Russia reduces reliance on NATO states and increases cooperation with non-Arctic powers in the high north, it is reasonable to expect that BRICS will become an Arctic institution.

The great economic realignment is increasingly organised with non-Western technologies, ships, insurances, investment banks and currencies. As the economic infrastructure is de-Americanised and transformed, it is reasonable to expect the institutional framework to change. This will also occur in the Arctic, Glenn Diesen @glenndiesen writes.

https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/room-for-cooperation-in-the-arctic/

#Asia_and_Eurasia #Arctic #Eurasia #geopolitics

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🌏 The concept of a civilisation state is now becoming almost an official approach to understand Russia’s place in the world.

It occupied a prominent place in Vladimir Putin’s recent speech at the 20th Annual meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club. This concept has both domestic and foreign policy dimensions. It relies to a certain extent on the works of conservative pre-revolutionary Russian thinkers (Ilyin, Danilevsky), and is intended to provide justification for the “peculiarity” and “special path” of Russia.

In more or less modern world politics as it is theoretically understood, the revival of attention to civilisational issues is associated not least with Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilisations”. The main provisions of this concept were published in 1993. The text itself appeared as a kind of response to the overly optimistic concept of the “End of History”, put forward in 1989 by Francis Fukuyama under the influence of the euphoria of the end of Cold War and bipolar confrontation.

Huntington’s concept played a role in promoting the idea of “the West vs the Rest” and therefore promoted a kind of internal mobilisation of the West in the new political conditions after the end of the Cold War. Although not directly, the influence of this concept can be traced in the development of the political practice of Western countries in the “projection of democracy” to other regions of the world and civilisation in the Huntingtonian sense. Thus, a course was laid for the universalisation of Western civilisation and its absorption by all others in the future (leaving only cultural differences in a kind of folklore sense).

The Russian case of a civilisation state, even if accepted on its own, still leaves room for questions about its universal applicability in other countries of the world, writes Valdai Club Programme Director Oleg Barabanov.

https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/civilisation-state-theory-and-practice/

#Norms_and_Values #civilisation #geopolitics

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🗺️ In the new international environment, geopolitics is increasingly beginning to determine the structure of economic interaction in the world.

We are inside a large long-term political cycle that will last in different countries, political circles and national elites. There are estimates that the current geopolitical crisis will last at least several years: in open American sources, the top officials have specified a period of 6-7 years. This sets a certain predictability for the development of events, although it does not make the situation simpler.

Just a year ago, business circles in different countries found it difficult to come to terms with the fact that geopolitics now determines the global economy. We have seen energetic attempts to unite industrialists and entrepreneurs in European countries to challenge the political vector that their government has chosen.

In Germany we observed clear public disagreement with this course on the part of individual leaders of particular states, who are interested in interaction with Russia. However, this has not affected the general strategic vector of the German government, which runs counter to the opinion of the country’s own businesses; many believe this is suicidal for the German economy.

The United States feels comfortable in the current prolonged crisis. An extremely important American goal is to eliminate any impulses of autonomy on the European continent, which are expected mostly from the countries of Western Europe.

However, non-Western states, with interests which are different from those of Europe and the United States, are ready to come up with their own ideas about how this crisis should be resolved, writes Andrey Sushentsov, Programme Director of the Valdai Discussion Club.

https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/who-is-better-prepared-for-a-long-geopolitical/

#ModernDiplomacy #geopolitics #WorldOrder

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🇨🇺 Cuba is one of the most important countries in the world; one of the few that can really disturb the sleep of the United States.

Geography makes this island geostrategic and whoever wants to challenge the United States must set foot on it. Dividing Cuba and the United States is a strip of sea that can be flown over in just one hour by plane, which means that the island is the perfect staging ground for  challenging the latter.

Geographical proximity can be a political advantage as well as a political risk, which is why the United States has historically gone to great lengths to gain control of this small island. 

Cuba has a role to play in the current hegemonic struggle between the West and the Rest. Russia and the BRICS should take advantage of its geostrategic and geopolitical position and act accordingly – Cuba's salvation might mean the Multipolar Transition's culmination, writes Emanuel Pietrobon, geopolitical analyst, political consultant and author from Italy.

https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/the-strategic-importance-of-cuba/

#EconomicStatecraft #Cuba #geopolitics

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