Valdai Club

On Monday, October 18, the 18th Annual Meeting of the Valdai Club began. After a two-year interruption caused by the pandemic, the conference participants returned to Sochi, its traditional venue. On the first day, a very intense session took place, as well as the Valdai Award ceremony. This year’s laureate was Mary Dejevsky.

The theme of the 18th Annual Meeting is “Global Shake-Up in the 21st Century: The Individual, Values, and the State”. Welcoming the participants, Andrey Bystritskiy, Chairman of the Board of the Foundation for Development and Support of the Valdai Discussion Club, noted that first of all, ordinary people are suffering from this shake-up and have borne all the burdens imposed on them by the pandemic. The global shake-up has prompted us to look at how our interaction with technology and with the climate will look like, and how civilisation will develop in general, given the new challenges, he stressed.

The question of how profound the changes we are going through are, in the era of the pandemic, was discussed by the participants of the first session, titled "Substitute for a World War or a Prelude to It?" Such an alarming title seemed to have a certain effect on the participants, who in their speeches strongly emphasised the undesirability of military escalation in the international system.

Meanwhile, if we talk about the possibility of a violent confrontation, the greatest concern in the world is the exacerbation of contradictions between the United States and China. The session began with an exchange of remarks between the representatives of these two powers. According to Thomas Graham, Distinguished Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), relations between the United States and China are becoming the epicentre of world geopolitics, and the situation around Taiwan is of particular concern. The United States believes that it is China that is behaving aggressively, and does not understand whether Beijing seeks to regain control of the island by force, or whether this is a process that will develop over time.

Uncertainty arises, in the context of which Washington will continue its policy of strategic ambivalence and strengthening engagement with Taiwan. "There are hints that the United States and its allies are ready to defend Taiwan under certain conditions," Graham said.

In turn, Zhou Bo, Senior Fellow at the Centre for International Security and Strategy at Tsinghua University, pointed out that China is not seeking conflict. “When Trump declared China and Russia the main geopolitical rivals, China was shocked,” he said. According to Zhou, China's behaviour has not changed since the founding of the PRC. The only change is that China has become part of the international economic system, built by the West and led by the United States. The strengthening of China, which by 2030 may become the largest economy in the world, naturally causes discontent among countries that do not want to lose their leadership. However, China does not seek confrontation and has called on other global players to focus on cooperation and the smoothing out of contradictions.

Meanwhile, the contradictions in the world are not limited by the struggle for world leadership. The pandemic has highlighted a number of global challenges, most notably the inequality - both at the national level and globally. According to Celso Amorim, Foreign Minister of Brazil (2003-2010), inequality is the main source of instability. To resolve this problem, it is necessary to encourage a multipolar system, but changes are also needed at the institutional level, he said. According to the Brazilian diplomat, only the G20 has sufficient representation and legitimacy among international institutions. Therefore, it should get more powers, and the IMF and the World Bank should be subordinated to the G20.

Oksana Sinyavskaya, Deputy Director at the Institute for Social Policy, at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE), spoke in detail about the inequality in social processes taking place in the world. The pandemic has highlighted the destructive role of inequality, "poking our faces into the value of human life," she said, and countries with high levels of inequality have suffered the most. It is inequality that will drive social change in the coming years, she stressed.

The introduction of programmes to help the poor in the era of the pandemic has caused a certain degree of enthusiasm and hope for a "left turn", but, according to Sinyavskaya, they represent a temporary phenomenon, since these actions are perceived by governments simply as part of macroeconomic policies. Sooner or later, they will be phased out, which will cause a new surge of social discontent, she believes. Elites are reluctant to acknowledge the 2008 and the current crises as part of a systemic crisis of the self-regulating market, and as long as social policy is part of economic policy, we are destroying the basis for social insurance that strengthened the middle class in the 20thcentury.

Tsogtbaatar Damdin, Member of the Parliament of Mongolia and Head of Mongolian Delegation at the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, also pointed to the danger of non-military factors for world stability. According to him, rich countries have experienced many types of discomfort in the context of the pandemic, but, nevertheless, they talk about the possibility of war, not imagining how to live in such conditions. “Over the past decades, we have lowered the value of the world, but we must talk about it again,” Damdin stressed. He proposed to celebrate September 2, the day World War II ended, as the day of the victory of human thought over war. “Even those who lost the war physically, like Germany or Japan, actually won,” he added.

The pandemic has highlighted the lack of solidarity in the world, and the multilateral responses to such emergencies should become one of the priorities on the international agenda, Damdin said. Moreover, given conditions such as climate change, the likelihood of a pandemic is higher than the likelihood of war. According to him, today it is easier to die from the spread of bacteria than from a bullet. Since the current pandemic won’t be the last, it makes sense to establish international rapid response medical units in regions of the world that would conduct exercises between pandemics. Mongolia has made such a proposal in the international venues.