The Way the World Should Be: Making Sense of Today’s Foreign Policymakers
© Alexei Danichev
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Have you ever read the full text of a declaration issued by a small or large gathering of leaders of these or those nations?
Who in the whole wide world reads these papers, polished after protracted battles of diplomats?
It seems, when the world is in relative order, almost nobody does it, since the things being declared are not new and all too obvious. While when the world is in complete chaos, like now, almost nobody reads declarations, since everybody is shutting ears and eyes from the bad fellows, afraid of being corrupted by them.
There was such a document, issued in Moscow earlier this week. Russia has been conducting a CIS summit, completing its one-year-long chairmanship of the organization.
CIS is the Commonwealth of Independent States, an organization of most of the formerly Soviet republics, formed on December 8, 1991. Many people of that era thought it was just another name for the USSR, while others called it a tool for a civilized divorce of the empire.
CIS is very much alive today, so the top leaders of Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belorussia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan attended the summit. At the looks of it, it’s something mostly Central Asian, like yet another grouping, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, with its Indian (and Chinese, etc.) membership. And when the Russian President Vladimir Putin went to Turkmenia the next day, to meet the leader of that non-CIS nation together with the new President of Iran and others, we saw a picture of yet another rather similar regional gathering, with interests spanning the center of Eurasia.
And so what, an undiplomatic fellow may say. Of course, any summit is useful, since neighbors have a chance to discuss a multitude of big and small common plans and problems. There always is a lot of eye-to-eye meetings, as they call it - on the margins of the summit itself. But then, the CIS summit has produced a declaration. Or rather two ministerial statements, to be precise, passed to the heads of states and governments for approval (purely formal).
One statement lists the basic ideas on maintaining security in Eurasia – which, by the way, definitely includes India, Pakistan and many other nations. Number one idea is, you cannot impose on anyone any standards, rules or norms, unless all the nations concerned have been participating in the drafting of those.
Isn’t that too obvious, to declare that rules-based order has to be built on universal acceptance of these rules? It definitely is. So the Moscow statement is, simply, saying to the West that it better keep these rules to itself, since we never agreed to these, and weren’t asked to. You talk to us first, and only then you may rest assured there’ll be no unexpected problems with the states who were jointly developing rules with you.
While another Moscow statement says that a nation or a group of nations cannot and should not impose “unilateral limitations”, mostly economic and financial, on any other states of the world. You, simply speaking, cannot apply at will pressure on anybody, not to mention harming these states’ economic interests with such pressure.
Even more simply speaking, economic sanctions are goddamn illegal.
You also cannot limit the right of anyone to move around the globe, to communicate and profess one’s religion or other convictions, just because you don’t like it, as the Moscow statements says. And, needless to say, if you try to do that, you are breaking the lot of international agreements, together forming that wonderful thing called the international legal system. You may do it on your own sovereign territory, maybe, but that’s all you can really do, if you want to be legal.
But, still, why all these statements are, shall we say, not sexy? Simply because they look like a hopeless prayer for an ideal world that may not come. The world as it should be bears no resemblance to the world as it is.
I belong to that dull category of people who do read statements, declarations and the rest, year after year. And so I can tell you that all the BRICS declarations, yes – developed and signed by India, too, contain almost the same basic concepts. That has been so ever since 2006, in fact earlier, since BRICS was been launched before that year with ministerial meetings in the UN, New York. And every summit listed very similar ideas, for everyone to read.
You may decry the slow way how that international patchwork is coming together, beginning from small regional groupings and evolving into what, today, is being called the Global Majority or the Global South. Surely if that went faster, then others had to pay attention, isn’t that so? But if you need big numbers, then how about the Nonaligned Movement that never really moved anywhere? I remember my attending its gathering as early as in the 1990-s, in Kuala Lumpur, when the number of nations represented exceeded 100. All the Global South was there. A declaration had, naturally, been signed.
Imagine that, the ideas in that declaration were very similar to the ones, promoted by BRICS, and by CIS, and the rest. The problem of sanctions was not as serious as it is now, though some people in India may disagree with me. But the general ideas of all those dozens of nations were clear even then, as in we have problems because of you, and you are not even listening to us.
So we know by now that they, the Global North, are not paying any attention to statements. In that case, not words but gentle actions are appropriate, so the CIS leaders in Moscow, in spite of having plenty of problems with each other, have still agreed to speed up economic and cultural cooperation.
In fact, we are talking about the process that already speeds itself up. Trade of Russia and some CIS members is skyrocketing, with nations like Azerbaijan, Armenia and Uzbekistan set to establish new records this year. And, as Vladimir Putin said in his concluding statement at the summit, new financial structures are being built up in our Commonwealth, with about 85 per cent of trade already conducted in national currencies.
The BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia, may be the next step in that direction. This week’s news tells us yet more nations want to participate, applying for BRICS membership or for an observer’s preliminary status inside the grouping. The new names on the list are Cuba and Syria, which makes that list of reported applicants exceed 20 nations.
The last thing we need is BRICS becoming very much like the Non-Aligned Movement, embracing almost all the Global Majority and emitting statements in the thin air. All the sights are on computer wizards and the finance people from several nations, currently developing several alternative inter-BRICS international payments systems using national currencies. If that thing starts working, no declarations will be needed for quite a while. That is, they won’t be needed until the moment the collective West starts listening to people around, who hate the current situations in the Middle East or around Ukraine and are suggesting principles for making the world more acceptable to all.
Dmitry Kosyrev is a Russian writer, author of spy novels and short stories. He also did columns for the Pioneer and Firstpost.com
