🇪🇺🌏 Can we expect the European Union to contribute to safeguarding regional security in Central Asia now that Afghanistan is back in the hands of the Taliban?

One thing is for sure, it is in the interest of the EU to have a stable, secure and prosperous Central Asia. As security concerns eminating from the crisis in Afghanistan have multiplied over night following the Taliban’s return to power, the region has made a dramatic resurfacing on the EU’s radar. In particular, the situation has set off alarm bells across European capitals about the possibility of a new refugee crisis emerging, as many Afghans are desperate to leave the country and go to Europe, writes Fabienne Bossuyt, Assistant Professor at Ghent University (Belgium) and professorial fellow at UNU-CRIS.

🔗 European Strategic Autonomy in Action? The EU’s Role as a Security Actor in Central Asia in the Wake of the US Withdrawal from Afghanistan

#Global_Governance #EU #Europe #CentralAsia #Afghanistan

@valdai_club — The Valdai Discussion Club

👥🌐 Almost two years after the spread of the coronavirus, all major social challenges and problems remain relevant.

🔹 Despite the higher mortality rate among the elderly, the aging of the population has not gone away. It continues to affect the processes in the labour market, public finances, and the slowdown in economic growth.

🔹 Technological change and the trend towards digitalisation remain with us, and have even accelerated.

🔹 The temporary reduction in migration flows due to the closure of sectors of the economy and borders only emphasised the almost invisible, but important role of migrants in safeguarding our lives.

🔹 At the same time, the pandemic showed a clear link between inequality and the magnitude of losses, not only economic or social, but also on a human scale. The phenomenon of higher mortality in countries with higher income inequality, known even before the pandemic, has received new empirical confirmation.

The coronavirus pandemic, while serving as a powerful shake-up, did not become the key to solving the accumulated social problems. High income inequality, often perceived as unfair, provokes an increase in social tension, which, in the absence of social cohesion, finds very crooked answers, writes Valdai Club expert Oksana Sinyavskaya.

🔗 The Coronavirus Pandemic: A Key to Solving Social Problems or a Catalyst for Them?

#Global_Governance #coronavirus #pandemic #society

@valdai_club — The Valdai Discussion Club

🇪🇺🇧🇾🇵🇱 After the countries of Western Europe implemented their large-scale project of expanding the European Union to the East in the early 2000s, they hoped to create a belt of countries around its perimeter, which could ensure a peaceful neighbourhood. This, however, turned out to be impossible — now the EU borders are a continuous conflict zone, writes Valdai Club Programme Director Timofei Bordachev.

🔗 Border Conflict and the New European Reality

#Global_Governance #Europe #migrantcrisis #Poland #Belarus

📷 ©Sputnik/Viktor Tolochko

@valdai_club — The Valdai Discussion Club

🗽 Both Trump and Biden seem to have jumped into the 21st century from a completely different era — a time when the ability of the United States to determine the fate of other sovereign peoples was not indisputable. They consistently tried to integrate their power into the changing landscape of multipolar global politics.

However, the problem is that the external environment is not becoming more favourable for the United States. Thanks to the enormous accumulated resources of “structural strength”, Americans can still make rather creative decisions and even meet with the readiness of other countries to agree with them. Nevertheless, now, as ever, any consent to follow American policy must be paid for in hard currency.

In fact, in the last stages of the Cold War and after its conclusion, the United States paid off its allies with access to benefits on a global scale. Now there are fewer and fewer opportunities to do this — only the weakness of the rest of the West, particularly Europe, saves American interests, writes Valdai Club Programme Director Timofei Bordachev.

🔗 The Confused Superpower: A Year After America's Elections

#Global_Governance #Biden #Trump #UnitedStates #politics

@valdai_club — The Valdai Discussion Club

🇺🇿 Over the years of its independent development, Uzbekistan has reached frontiers that have completely changed its image and place in the world community.

In a relatively short period of time, it has been possible for the country to develop a regulatory and legal framework for reforms, lay the foundations of a market infrastructure, ensure financial and macroeconomic stabilisation, carry out institutional transformations, create a diversified economy and new industries, form a mechanism to stimulate small business, as well as to achieve energy independence and come closer to grain independence.

The result of the reforms carried out over the past 5 years has been the formation of New Uzbekistan on the world arena, whose main goal is to ensure a free, comfortable and prosperous life for the people of the country.

Uzbekistan’s unique experience accumulated in recent history pursuing a balanced implementation of reforms without the negative elements of shock therapy provides grounds for optimism, opens up new prospects and may be of interest to the rest of Eurasia, writes Umid Abidkhadjaev, Director of the Institute for Forecasting and Macroeconomic Research under the Ministry of Economic Development and Poverty Reduction of the Republic of Uzbekistan.

🔗 The Digital and Green Agendas of New Uzbekistan

#Global_Governance #Uzbekistan #CentralAsia

@valdai_club — The Valdai Discussion Club

🌐 In this new twenty-first century, more and more is happening beyond our national border, and this legitimises the strengthening of the multilateral scaffolding.

For this, it is also essential not only to define international peace and security – the cornerstone of the functioning and role of the Security Council and the veto power of the P5 – in classic terms of military hard power, but also to evolve towards a paradigm that incorporates the notion of human security coined in the UNDP Human Development Report of 1994, New dimensions of human security.

The principle of great power competition – with its corollary of strategic stability – can no longer be the organisational element of the international system, as it was during the Cold War period.

We are facing a systemic problem: how globalisation is going to be directed and what course it will pursue, in the face of the greatest challenges facing humanity as a whole: ecological degradation and the constant irruption of science and technology.

These two tendencies require us, inexorably, to privilege cooperation and collaboration over confrontation, writes Ambassador Ricardo E. Lagorio, Secretary General of the Argentina Council on Foreign Relations, CARI.

🔗 Some Reflections on the Global Scenario in the New 21st Century

#Global_Governance #globalism #worldorder

@valdai_club — The Valdai Discussion Club

🇷🇺🌏 Russia’s policy towards is neighbours is based on three factors: the traditional power component, the existence of a common geopolitical space, and a common history.

Russia has been and remains the dominant power in the so-called post-Soviet space, because it has the largest population, one of the world’s best armies, and a large arsenal of nuclear weapons that is commensurate only to the US stockpile. However, it should be remembered that topography precludes the marking of clear dividing lines between Russia and its neighbours, and that common historical experience will always influence decisions.

Therefore, Russia’s military-political might cannot guarantee control of its neighbours or allow it to keep aloof of them.

Many problems could be solved if Moscow resumed a form of direct control of a part of the former Soviet republics. But the effort required could eventually prove fatal to the Russian economy and statehood. Keeping aloof of its neighbours would imply the development of a defensive strategy for the areas in direct proximity to vital centres of Russian territory. Military domination is a way to develop relations favourable for a sustainable but not imperial international order around Russia, that is, an order that does not include direct control of neighbours.

Moscow needs to find a form of interaction with its neighbours that supports the national security and relative peace of the countries along Russian borders without dictating domestic or foreign policy rules to them, Timofei Bordachev,  the author of a new Valdai Club's report, titled “Space Without Borders: Russia and Its Neighbours”. The report was prepared especially for the 30th anniversary of the collapse of the USSR.

🔗 Space Without Borders: Russia and Its Neighbours — Valdai Discussion Club Report

👉 While working on this report from March through September 2021, I visited
several capitals and other cities in the post-Soviet states, where I met with local intellectuals, politicians and public figures. The content of the conversations, as well as the interpretation of the assessments and opinions expressed in the framework of almost fifty interviews, were used in the preparation of the report.

❗️ The presentation of the report will take place today, December 20, at 12:00 Moscow Time (GMT+3). Watch it live on our website!

#Global_Governance #CIS #Russia #Eurasia

@valdai_club — The Valdai Discussion Club

🇷🇺🌎 At the end of 2021, relations between Russia and the West in the military-political sphere crossed the point of no return to any of the forms of interaction that arose in the first decade and a half after the Cold War.

The fact that Russia and the West will in the near future once again vigorously target each other with military forces will simply reproduce the nature of relations between the powers along the entire historical path of their development at a new technical level.

This, apparently, is the way things are going, regardless of whether the relationship is expecting serious crises or they will develop according to an inertial scenario, writes Valdai Club Programme Director Timofei Bordachev.

🔗 Counter-Threat Regime and Strategic Frivolity

#Global_Governance #NATO #WorldOrder

📷 ©Reuters

@valdai_club — The Valdai Discussion Club

🐉🌏🦅 It is difficult to overestimate how seriously the current American-Chinese divergence into two different poles will affect the world.

Moreover, despite the fact that the economic divorce in different areas is slow, due to the huge number of mutual ties that are not always visible to the naked eye, the intensity of passions in political rhetoric is no laughing matter. 

However, for the “Greater Eurasia” project, the intensification of US-Chinese competition, on the contrary, presents a new horizon for development, as if reminding us that in the Chinese language, the word “crisis” consists of two characters: “danger” and “chance” (危机), writes Adil Kaukenov, Director of China Center (Kazakhstan).

🔗 Greater Eurasia and the US-China Confrontation

#Global_Governance #UnitedStates #China #Eurasia

@valdai_club — The Valdai Discussion Club

🌐 In the outgoing year, international politics finally got rid of all remnants of controllability.

In principle, the global changes in the balance of power, provoked by the growth of China and the West’s reaction to this, initially did not leave much room for the leading powers to consider the interests of others as among their own.

However, until recently, one could expect that the most important consequence of the destruction of the United States’ monopoly together with its closest allies on playing the role of a global distributor of benefits, would be the democratisation of international politics: the need to create broad coalitions capable of solving the most important tasks on the basis of comparatively equal benefits. This, in turn, could increase the controllability of world affairs, which was considerably shaken in the decades since the Cold War.

As we can see, these expectations turned out not to be sufficiently connected with reality, and now the states are faced, not with the task of how to improve human civilization and cooperation with each other, but how to manage the relative general savagery.

The passing into oblivion of international institutions, the most important achievement of the 20th century, leaves a huge field of opportunities for the great powers, and we cannot say now which of them will be in demand in order to avoid general destruction, writes Valdai Club Programme Director Timofei Bordachev.

🔗 Undemocratic Uncontrollable World

#Global_Governance #Valdai_WrapUp2021 #worldorder

@valdai_club — The Valdai Discussion Club