🇪🇺🇷🇸🇷🇺 If Serbia becomes a member of the EU, it could find allies which share the same civilisational interests in the Visegrad group.

This would be a good way to soften the position of certain V4 members towards Russia, writes Arnaud Gouillon, director of the Office for Cooperation with the Diaspora and the Serbs in the Region in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Serbia.

📌 The publication of the article is devoted to the Russian-Serbian conference of the Valdai Discussion Club. The Conference took place on June 24 in Belgrade.

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https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/the-development-of-serbian-russian-relations/

😷🌐 If we assume that the main task of the social sciences is to provide a theoretical understanding of the events taking place in the world, then the past year and a half since the start of the coronavirus pandemic has provided sufficient time to start doing this.

The specific nature of the social sciences in the 21st century is the almost-obligatory combination of theory with a set of values and an ethical imperative. In this regard, the question of ethical analysis of the pandemic is quite appropriate, writes Oleg Barabanov, programme director of the Valdai Discussion Club.

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https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/global-ethical-responsibility-in-the-context/

💲🌐 The globalisation-based financial supercapitalism model, of which the United States was a beneficiary for quite a long time, has run its course.

The global economy has reached the apex of an all-time lending boom, but the expansive growth of debt shows that most national economies are supported mainly by massive public and private borrowing. A major vulnerability has been identified in the global economic system that took years to build: halting the Fed’s printing press, another crisis sweeping the United States, or even a slight increase in interest rates, will trigger a major economic crisis unseen since the Great Depression.

Weak growth in the global economy, low and negative interest rates, the risk of endless stagnation and rising inflation, and prospects for a prolonged recession are, unfortunately, part of the economic reality.

Many economists, analysts and researchers from different schools and areas strive to fi nd a way out of the dead-end and to show prospects for new geoeconomic models. A book by Klaus Schwab, the founder of the Davos Forum, about the global reset received wide coverage in the media not so long ago. It claims that the post-pandemic world will never be the same. It is certainly interesting to hear views on the future coming from the billionaire community, but there is also China and its position and a leftist train of thought.

👉 The paper by Michael Hudson and Radhika Desai, who are anti-imperialist leftists, also explores the reasons for the financial world being the way it is, and how one can put an end to dollar hegemony and to create a multicurrency financial system before existing imbalances completely destroy everything.

📌 A new Valdai Paper №116 "Beyond the Dollar Creditocracy: A Geopolitical Economy" is published on our website. You can also download it in PDF.

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https://valdaiclub.com/a/valdai-papers/valdai-papers-116/

💉🦠🌐 The ‘Indian’ strain of coronavirus known as ‘Delta’ has spread to many countries leading to a sharp increase of the third wave of the pandemic.

The peculiarity of this new wave is that it is occuring for the first time since the creation of vaccines against coronavirus. Therefore, in those countries that were able to effectively carry out large-scale vaccination of the population (for example, in the UK, where more than 50% of the population is vaccinated), the third wave, despite the high daily increase in new cases, is accompanied by extremely low mortality.

At the same time, almost all existing vaccines, as their manufacturers admit, provide lower protection against the new Indian strain, since they were created before it appeared.

🟢 The issue of public trust in the government and vaccine developers is becoming the key to successfully overcoming the pandemic.

🔴 The use of administrative levers to increase the rate of vaccination raises the issue of human and civil rights observance with regard to the agenda, writes Valdai Club Programme Director Oleg Barabanov.

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https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/vaccines-the-indian-strain-and-human-rights/

🇻🇪 It must be admitted that the Maduro government’s position is still highly precarious, given the continuing sanctions and a severe humanitarian crisis in the country. But recently the stars have formed a configuration that favours the Chavista leader. 

▪️ The US-supported regional attempts to form a united right-wing front against the Nicolas Maduro government failed, something that can be listed as an undoubted success of the Venezuelan authorities, if not always resulting from their direct efforts.

▪️ Today, Venezuela can rely on the support of two important regional players – Mexico and Argentina – although their positions do not always fully concur. 

▪️ Venezuela has gained its right to political sovereignty through much suffering, a right to international political identity. This is a crucial factor enabling it to join the building of a true multipolar world or, to be more precise, a polycentric world order.

It is the common orientation to this goal that underlies Russia’s strategic cooperation with both Venezuela and the rest of the Latin American region, writes Valdai Club expert Dmitry Razumovsky.

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https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/venezuela-light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel/

🇲🇳🇷🇺 This year marks the 100th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Mongolia and Russia. 

Since both Mongolia's neighbours today are strategic partners, the vast Eurasian space is a monolithic region for strategic cooperation.

On the basis of such a strong platform in the coming era, mutual relations that arose in the past century, changed the established rules at the geopolitical level and led to changes in the structure of international relations in the region have all the necessary ingredients for expanding growth and development. 

The past 100 years of cooperation between Mongolia, Russia, and China in creativity, efficiency and productivity in the sphere of the economy, education, healthcare, research, culture, etc. have surpassed hundreds of years of interaction in the past millennium. Therefore, in the next 100 years the results will surpass everything we have achieved so far, believes Tsogtbaatar Damdin, Member of the Parliament of Mongolia, Head of the Mongolian delegation to the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly.

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https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/a-century-that-changed-the-rules/

🪧🌐 The anti-globalisation ideology was based on non-systemic left-wing or left-anarchist ideas.

But this boom of leftist protest, paradoxically, as a model, had a stimulating effect on the growth of non-systemic right-wing protests in many countries. These were also based on the ordinary man’s distrust in the elites and the authorities, but the emphasis was on preserving national identity, on its erosion in the context of globalisation and on global migrant flows, writes Valdai Club Programme Director Oleg Barabanov.

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https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/from-anti-globalisation-to-anti-vaccine-movement/

🌍 The Balkans are still “nobody's land”.

But now not because the international community doesn’t care about them, but because in the existing coordinate system the Balkans are the “cheapest” figure on the common chessboard of international relations in Europe. 

It turns out that the aggravation of the situation instead of regional reconciliation is beneficial, by and large, for the United States, Great Britain and the EU.In case of conflicts and instability, the PRC loses the final section of the Belt and Road project.  For Russia, the potential opening of a "third front", not to mention the threat to the energy project, if not unacceptable, then it brings  to the brink of a possible resource. In the event of new tension, Turkey finds itself involved not only in the Middle East and Transcaucasian, but also in the Balkan stories.

The new conflict of medium tension, oddly enough, can be successfully used by the diplomacy of the European Union: the ethno-national context easily transforms the new violence in the Balkans into “another confrontation between barbarians”, where the central element in any case are the Serbs, “voluntarily or involuntarily incited by the increased ambitions of Moscow ". 

What is happening in the Balkans is a provocation, writes Valdai Club expert Ekaterina Entina.

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https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/nobody-s-balkan-land/

🌐 The world is experiencing a transitional phase characterised by risks and new opportunities.

Multilateralism can repeat, mutatis mutandis, the logic of the Treaty of Westphalia of 1648; alternatively it can accelerate the process of integration at the international level, according to the logic of The Federalist Papers, written in 1788 by Hamilton, Jay and Madison.

The processes underway are accelerating more rapidly than expected. The alternative between a multilateralism that produces tensions and wars and a peaceful multilateralism based on collaboration and innovative forms of integration is destined to take a dramatic turn if far-sighted decisions are not taken in good time.

The design conceived by Roosevelt’s heirs at the end of the Second World War was a great US - Europe – Russia alliance. This design was shelved due to the development of the Cold War. A possible initiative today can be constituted by the resumption in renewed forms of an alliance between the USA - Europe - Russia, which has its roots in secular history and from the union that allowed the victory against Nazism.

The convergence between these three great countries would constitute a fundamental contribution to the construction of a more peaceful international order, writes Dario Velo, Full Professor of Pavia University.

https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/the-development-of-a-peaceful-multipolar-order/

#Morality_and_Law #worldorder #multipolarity #Europe @valdai_club

🧱🌐 Is the Berlin Wall destined to be reborn (or is already being reborn) in a new form in the modern world or not?

August 13, 2021, marks the 60th anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall - perhaps the most famous symbol of the Cold War. 

Of course, today's conflicts do not correspond to that idealised and even romantic image of a "chivalrous" Cold War. 

❓Is a geopolitical confrontation even possible without the Berlin Wall, if everything collapses without the wall?

In the 21st century, there can be a "cyber wall", an Internet firewall or the wall of an information monopoly, or a vaccine wall, or a doping wall (against the background of the past Olympics), or a visa wall, or something else.

The global chessboard differs from ordinary chess in that you can build walls between the cells, Oleg Barabanov, programme director of the Valdai Discussion Club.

https://valdaiclub.com/a/highlights/the-berlin-wall-and-the-ethics-of-the-cold-war/

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