Valdai Club

The current pandemonium surrounding globalization is not primarily a direct result of the pandemic. Our pandemonium has emerged, instead, from the ways in which the pandemic and quarantine magnified the fissures and challenges that have been increasingly threatening the stability of the current era of globalization over the past several decades.

How the EU reacts today will definitely shape the EU’s tomorrow. “Sovereign Europe” has been a buzz phrase over the past two years, and its establishment has been posited as a potential solution to the EU’s challenges. There is no exact meaning of Sovereign Europe, but the core of the concept is its unity and the ability to protect citizens, writes Jin Ling, Senior Research Fellow at the China Institute of International Studies

It is possible that the countries participating in Eurasian economic integration now consider it more profitable to slow down and achieve greater sustainability, having temporarily sacrificed extensive development, both in terms of areas of cooperation and in the levels of the arrangements implementation, writes Timofei Bordachev, Programme Director of the Valdai Club.

Just as Boris Johnson’s election victory had seemed to bring welcome clarity, Coronavirus swept into muddy the waters again. But it also illustrated the risks for the UK of being a medium-sized country alone, writes Valdai Club expert Mary Dejevsky. The EU’s collective response to the virus may have left much to be desired, though there has been more medical and economic cooperation than it often appeared. But the response of the US hardly offered any attractive alternative model.

The grave consequences of the pandemic for Africa provide more opportunities to expand Russia’s presence and spheres of influence on the continent by allowing it to go beyond the production and exports of minerals and raw materials to the soft security sphere and greater opportunities for Russia’s soft power, writes Natalia Piskunova, Associate Professor at Lomonosov Moscow State University, World Politics Department.

For BRICS to stay as a relevant global organisation, it needs to make better use of its organisational strength and structure. For BRICS to maintain its relevance, it needs to harden its stance on tackling critical situations like the pandemic, that is presently causing enormous global problem, writes Valdai Club expert Nivedita Das Kundu.

If nature has shown its real ability to quickly cleanse itself, then why did it take a terrible epidemic, and why can’t mankind achieve it otherwise? Even if we disregard environmental mysticism and eschatology, the notion that through the epidemic nature takes revenge on man, this demonstrable example the positive impact of the epidemic on nature could serve as the strongest argument for expanding the green movement, writes Valdai Club Programme Director Oleg Barabanov.

It is difficult to call into question the character of Russian-Indian relations that have withstood the test of the time, to use a cliché. The strategic value of this relationship has remained immutable both in the bipolar period of the Cold War and the global order that has been formed since then

Neither India nor Russia are interested in the US-China confrontation: the winner would be too strong, and a war between the two nuclear powers is likely to escalate into a conflict involving the use of nuclear weapons, the escalation of which could get out of control, writes Valdai Club expert Alexei Kupriyanov.

The novel coronavirus once allows us again to see the fragility of human beings. It is not a shame to admit we are still so weak and still struggle for survival in the earth. But it is unthinkable that human beings so easily forget history lessons why we need to work together to defeat our common threat, writes Wang Wen, Executive Dean of Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies (RDCY), Deputy Dean of Silk Road School, Renmin University of China.