Valdai Club

The fall of the USSR in 1989-91 provoked a sense of omnipotence in the dominant circles of Western capitalism, all the more so as it was preceded by a decade in which neoliberalism triumphantly ascended in the West itself (1980-90), as well as the decline of a series of Third World regimes that had emerged from anti-colonial, national liberation movements and revolutions.

By intervening more actively in the current crisis in the Middle East, the BRICS can show that they represent a much broader hope for humanity than the declining West. The situation in Palestine is an enormous, historic political opportunity for the proponents of a multipolar, that is, a more democratic world, Dimitris Konstantakopoulos writes.

The basic justification of every policy of the West is the ideology of ecumenism the West is projecting, full of complacency and arrogance. However, it is a false ecumenism, as it corresponds only to the narrow interests of the Western ruling classes, not the interests of humanity, writes Valdai Club expert Dimitris Konstantakopoulos.

Given the dependence of Western countries on the USA, the Non-Aligned Movement, representing today the majority of the countries and of the population of the planet and disposing of an economic power much greater than at the time when it was first created, has a historic opportunity to intervene in the on-going sui generis world war, writes Dimitris Konstantakopoulos.

It is clear that we are entering worldwide an era of very grave social, political and international conflicts and we cannot exclude new wars, writes Dimitris Konstantakopoulos, former adviser to the Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou and Member of Secretariat of the Central Committee of the SYRIZA Party. We cannot say what the world of tomorrow will be or what will be the place of capitalism in it. What we can say with almost certainty is that the future world will be very different from the one we know.

A very serious rift regarding Ukraine is now developing between the Ecumenical (Universal) Patriarchate of Constantinople and the biggest and more powerful among the Orthodox Christian Churches, the Russian one.

Greece still exists, albeit decapitated, without leaders, forces, or intellectuals to articulate its truth and its rights. And as it has proved, time and again, in thousands of years of a permanent threatened existence, the Greek people has a unique capacity to produce miracles, when nobody is waiting for them.

The problem of rejection and erosion of the neoliberal mainstream has reached a new level in 2015.