Valdai Club

The term civilization is loaded with various meanings and understandings. One of them is of course the opposition to the barbarians, who are considered to have no adequate culture and systems of social and political organization, writes Misa Djurkovic for the 21st Annual meeting of the Valdai Discussion Club.

Essentially, during the last half millennium, the Western world looked at the entire rest of the world as a terra misiones, a space inhabited by barbarians, which should be occupied, civilized, European clothing and customs imposed on them, etc. Let's remember that such different thinkers as Marx, Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill equally advocate European colonialism as a necessary civilizational step forward.

It is undeniable that that part of the world really succeeded thanks to technological progress and the system of organization (from the factory to the army) to empower itself so much that it could dictate the conditions for several centuries and even onto such civilizations as India and China.

But among other things, due to the terrible wars that the European powers waged among themselves in the name of control of the colonies, the western area started a path of radical decline. These spaces, to follow Spengler's terminology, have passed from the stage of culture that develops and progresses to the stage of civilization, which means decline, petrification and loss of creative potential.

Through corporations, social networks and popular culture, the Western world promotes suicidal value systems, obviously aimed at reducing the world's population and unfortunately succeeds in marketing this to other great cultures and civilizations. Let's remember the example of China, but also of the Arab world, which has almost completely completed the demographic transition. Major Islamic cultures like Iran and Turkey have fertility rates that are well below 2 children per woman and are moving towards the European average.

The treatment of dogs in the west that are substitutes for children, and the spillover of this habit to other cultures, clearly speaks to this harmful influence of the west, which is more destructive than even the wars that the West has waged against others over the past few decades.

Other cultures and civilizations must first learn how to defend themselves individually or collectively against dangerous European fundamentalism. It is undeniable that many countries and cultures are rising in every respect, reducing their dependence on the West and taking leading positions in various fields, from the economy to sports and culture. But precisely because of this redistribution of power globally, but also among these new players, we are witnessing a very dangerous and dynamic period of transition. In such times it is very difficult to preserve global and regional stability.

There are huge global and regional problems with drinking water, energy, food, diverse distribution of raw materials and natural resources, economic migration, etc. But what is important is that in the future we will not proceed with the assumed dominance of the American unipolar view of the world in solving these problems, where American mediation and the American way of imposing solutions were expected everywhere.

It seems that the economic and military rise of other parts of the world also brings the right to recognize the strength of these cultures or civilizations and legitimize their capacities for independent regional and intra-civilizational problem solving. The example of the agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, which was concluded with the help of China, hints at the world we are talking about.

This is why numerous forums like BRICS or Mercosur are important, where frameworks for such debates, dialogues and solutions are created. And it is important to free global bodies such as the UN or the World Health Organization, both from the domination and patronage of Western powers, and from the all-pervasive corrupt activities of the largest Western corporations, such as those in the biomedical field.