Valdai Club

What is happening in the world? Is it a revolution that is breaking old foundations and bringing something fundamentally new? Or is it just a cyclical shake-up that will stir up the environment, but leave intact the principles of relations between states that did not change for millennia? And will the new turn out to be the well-forgotten old in the next stage?

The never-ending political infighting in the US could be viewed as an inevitable stage in an overly complex path the US must take to find its place in the world, one that is changing in spite of what the US wants or thinks. On the other hand, these political struggles make it even harder and more painful for the US and for the rest of the world to adapt to these changes.

No one is afraid of war. Russia and the US act in their national interests, without looking at the opposite side, increasing the level of confrontation.

A quarter of a century after the end of the Cold War, the world is out of joint. One problem is that currently all major powers or power groupings are in a state of transition. This goes for the United States and for the EU, for Russia and for China, for Saudi Arabia and for Iran, for India and Brazil and South Africa. At the same time, their geopolitical relationships are undergoing convulsive change.

From the carnival-like referendum in Catalonia (like a scene straight out of Verdi’s Don Carlos) to the bloody clashes in Myanmar (hardly something out of the Bhagavad Gita, but still), recent events set in stark relief the striking change in the nature of modern conflicts compared even to the not-too-distant past. They are increasingly chaotic and localized, reflecting humanity’s fragmentation and loss of purpose rather than general progress.  

It has often been said that the European Enlightenment represented the transition of humanity from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. Philosophies of social progress have seen history as freedom unfolding under its own momentum. With the arrival of the new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene it now seems that the flourishing of human freedoms has been at the same time eroding the foundations on which they were built.

There is need for a common understanding of how rich-poor gaps tie in locally with geopolitical, economic and demographic dynamics fuelling tensions and conflicts along class, ethno-racial, gender and sectarian lines.

The conflict of universalism and identity seems fictitious, if we understand by universalism a certain set of common (universal) laws, rules, hierarchies and models of interaction of individual elements with each other within a system.

Emerging technologies (artificial intelligence, genomics, robotics, neuroscience, nanotechnologies, etc.) will not merely be tools of the New World Order, but will define and structure that order.