On April 4-5, 2023, the Moscow Economic Forum took place. The main task of the forum was to unite society and form a development program, to promote the implementation of this program based on the experts of the Forum.
One of the speakers of the forum was Dr. Aymeric Chauprade, political scientist, professor, associate professor of geopolitics at universities and military academies in France, Switzerland, Morocco and Tunisia. Mr. Chauprade is the author of many fundamental works on geopolitics, such as «Geopolitics: constants and variability in history», «Encyclopedia of geopolitics: countries, concepts, authors», «Chronicle of the struggle of civilizations». Doctor Chauprade is an active social and political figure, from 2014 to 2019 he was a member of the European Parliament.
You can find Dr. Aymeric Chauprade' CV below.
Dr. Chauprade has kindly provided his speech, presented in frames of the Forum session "From Globalism to Multipolarity", with the readers of the Armenian Association of Political Scientists.
Please find below French version of Dr. Chauprade' speech.
From Globalism to Multipolarity
By Dr. Aymeric Chauprade
"Dear President, distinguished colleagues and guests,
First of all, I would like to say that it is with great emotion that I am here in Moscow in the dramatic context that our European continent is experiencing today.
By my presence, I am testifying to the constancy and solidity of my convictions, which I have been asserting in favour of the multipolar world for 30 years now. In March 2014, while I was in the middle of the campaign for the European elections, I went to Crimea to observe the referendum on the future of the province. I was told at the time in France, including in my political camp, that it was unwise. I replied that one of the few things that will give me some self-esteem at the end of my life will be to have been ahead of history, even if this was not understood at the time.
Today, to those who tell me that it was imprudent to come to Moscow, I say the same thing: history will prove that the women and men of good will are right to refuse the fatality of a war between Russia and Europe.
The history of the world is confused with the history of empires. And the history of empires is intertwined with the history of attempts at globalization. Some empires in history have been content with immense regions.
The Chinese empire had only one ambition, to secure its borders against the regular incursions of nomadic barbarians who came to devastate Chinese civilization. The steppe empire was the kingdom of the horses; it aimed to extend the grazing lands and to go and plunder the sedentary civilizations.
Other empires have had global ambitions, the ambition to lead globalization movements. The Roman Empire is in this logic. So did the English empire.
At the end of the 19th century, it was said of the English empire that "the sun never set".
And of course American globalization, which began with the unification of the West and East coasts with the first Latin American imperialism, and then the takeover of European rivalries at the beginning of the 20th century.
The United States financed both sides during the First World War, before finally choosing, after much debate, to support England in 1917. American capitalism financed the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.
American globalisation really began in July 1944 with Bretton Woods and the building of an international financial system dominated by the dollar.
We still live in the West in this system which is probably dying. Russia and China tried to oppose this system of alienation, with the USSR and Chinese communism. We knew the bipolar world when the USSR was a geopolitical, military and ideological power against the West.
In 1990, the collapse of the USSR immediately meant an acceleration of American globalism: the invasion of Iraq, the destruction of Yugoslavia in order to integrate it nation by nation into NATO, then globally and in successive phases the progression of NATO to the borders of Russia by integrating countries linked to the former USSR. History has never stopped, contrary to the lie of Fukuyama who confused the American geopolitical progression in the world with the End of History.
Globalism has never stopped. It has tried everything. It has tried to destroy oil nationalist regimes, from Iraq to Libya, including the attempt to stifle Iran. Fomenting coloured revolutions in the former Russian sphere of influence, in the Caucasus, in Central Asia, in Ukraine.
Brzezinki in The Great Russian Chessboard wrote it in 1997. In order to break Russia geopolitically, it would be necessary to take the Ukraine and attach it to Atlanticist Europe.
In fact, since the end of multipolarity, two great historical movements have clashed like tectonic plates: the movement shaping a multipolar world, and the globalist movement pursuing its attempt at world domination with the help of its financial tool.
Any attempt at globalist domination is at once geopolitical, normative (the ideology of Human Rights now degenerated into decadent by-products such as LGBT minority ideology and wokism) and financial (the domination of the dollar as the world's reserve currency).
The Atlanticists would have us believe that America stands for peace and democracy. There is only one answer to this, and it is factual. America's defence budget alone is equal to all the defence budgets in the world. Does a country that has developed a military-industrial complex so enormous that it largely controls American policy have any other function than to wage war in the world in order to conquer markets by force and install subservient governments by force? Perhaps the countries that resist this have imperfect governments.
May be they make mistakes, but who doesn't? But one thing is certain, those countries that are resisting are trying to resist the globalism that is spreading all over the world. But today what I see as a geopolitologist who has been analyzing the world for more than 30 years is that, despite the American wars, the multipolar world is well and truly taking shape.
We have multipolar powers, Russia, China, India, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Brazil, and many others who are asserting increasingly independent and multipolar policies and who refuse to be subservient to any other power.
We can also see this in Africa, where many countries want to leave the tutelage of the former colonial power and diversify their foreign policy and economic relations. There is a great movement of de-dollarisation of the world economy in which I believe very much and which for me is based on the necessary cooperation between three great powers, Russia, China and India, which is essential and which we must not forget in this multipolarity.
The Europeans are printing euros, the Americans are printing dollars. They are trapped in a crazy train, that of their financial system, which they can only maintain by printing money, but which nobody knows how to stop.
Meanwhile, their citizens are looking for a way out, some jumping off the train into gold, others into Bitcoin. But all lucid Europeans know that American globalization is in its death throes. And it is always in the great changes in the balance of power that the declining power becomes dangerous. It is tempted to use its military potential, its networks of influence, its intelligence, to damage its adversaries, to destabilize, to create conflicts like the one in Ukraine.
We are in the process of experiencing the difficult transition from American globalism to multipolarity. It is obvious that globalism does not accept this and the risk is that the wars it provokes do not degenerate into a global nuclear conflict.
We are therefore at a critical stage. Let us never forget that because it was the only one with the atomic bomb, the United States did not hesitate to send two atomic bombs to Japan. To this day, America is the only power to have broken the taboo on the use of nuclear power.
We are facing an immense challenge: to say goodbye to globalism and to enter the multipolar era based on new balances of power, without the current conventional conflict between NATO and Russia, which is an indirect but violent conflict, being transformed into a direct conflict which could not be limited to a conventional confrontation. I will discuss the possible solutions to this challenge in my second speech.
Thank you".
Comments