Michel Guénaire is a business lawyer and essayist. He publishes:
The Return of the States
(Grasset, 2013) and
Pierre Gide, A Lawyer's Life
(Perrin, 2020).
The image went around the world.
They were walking in the gardens of a summer palace in June 2009 in Ekaterinburg, Russia.
Dmitry Medvedev and Hu Jintao were surrounded by Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik and Uzbek presidents.
They had just congratulated Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on his re-election at the head of Iran, indifferent to the accusations of the international community which pointed the finger at the multiple irregularities of the ballot.
Their association was born seven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and took the name of Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) at a meeting in the Chinese city in 2001. During his first two terms as president of the Russian Federation, from 2000 to 2008, Vladimir Putin had wanted to play the card of the West, but, speaking at the Munich Security Conference of February 9-11, 2007, had however already denounced the NATO and American unilateralism.
The strategic partnership launched on 7 May 2009 between the European Union and six states neighboring Russia, including Ukraine, put an end to the Western dream and revived Russia's Eastern roots.
Read also“For love for Russia, let us hope that it returns to its European destiny”
This was to begin from the control of the countries which it considers as buffer zones of its territory, the "near abroad", in the words of Putin.
Russia was going to reassert the role of animating the vast region governed before it by the Soviet Union, and even before it by the Empire of the Tsars.
It was a development parallel to that of globalization.
Was it the old world resisting the new?
Rather, it was the East that was reconstituting the marches of its ancient empires in the face of the desire for global world expansion.
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The West did not see this development, blinded by confidence in its model after the collapse of the communist world.
The West did not believe it, witnessing the massive support around it for the merits of liberal capitalism.
It was his disbelief.
Disbelief that originated in the terrible prophecy of the End of History, announced in a resounding article in the summer of 1989 in the magazine
The National Interest
, by the young official of the American State Department, Francis Fukuyama.
When the Berlin Wall fell, liberal democracy associated with the market was to impose a universal development model.
The West thus claimed the right to overthrow the teams in power in several countries of the world (
Regime Change
), and to promote, with the complicity of political and economic multilateral institutions, a standard political organization (
Nation Building
).
Putin is often presented as a single man.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Michel Guénaire
For their part, the Shanghai associates continued to meet every year, in Tashkent in 2010, Astana in 2011 and Beijing in 2012. of the G8 (G7 + Russia) at Camp David to go to that of the OCS.
Russia, China and their allies, soon to be joined by India and Iran, as well as Turkey as an observer member, were to understand very quickly that the
Regime Change
and the
Nation Change
were instruments of influence for the West, by no means the promise of a peaceful world.
Putin is often presented as a single man.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Read alsoRussia, China, Turkey: “When empires strike back”
The disbelief of the West was candor, blindness and unconsciousness.
This caused a break with the very world that he wanted to convert to his values by advancing his model without respect for the history of nations, and deprived himself of the ultimate lucidity that preserves wars.
On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, and there is every reason to believe that it will go through with the exercise in intimidating the West that it intends to carry out through this invasion, since the globalization must not go all the way in its desire to conquer all the nations of the world.
There will be no single world.
There will be a balance of the world, by the search for the famous
Checks and Balances
inherited from the treaties of Westphalia of 1648 which had given their rules to the dialogue between the States on the rubble of the universal monarchy.
There will not be a single world as there is no international society, but, as analyzed by Raymond Aron, the inter-state system, "
belligerent even in apparently peaceful times
" (
Peace and war between nations
) .
If the States get closer and establish exclusive relations in the East as in the West of the world, it will be, finally, world against world.
In the new tension which arises between the nations, it is necessary to act only if one is strong.
Michel Guénaire
In geopolitics, weakness is guilt.
What can the extension of the circle of members of the Atlantic Alliance be worth in the face of an adversary who seeks the comfort of his markets?
How to move forward in such an enterprise without having previously measured the balance of power with the one who has prepared so much militarily to repel it?
In the new tension which arises between the nations, it is necessary to act only if one is strong.
The West - first and foremost Europe, whose ruling elites believed more than anyone else in the end of the creations and overruns of History - is called upon for intellectual and moral reform.
He must see the world as it is, not as it should be.
Everything needs to be rebuilt: the goals of dialogue between nations, the golden rule of diplomacy, the regional organizations themselves such as the Atlantic Alliance and the European Union.
Of course, universality will remain the most beautiful promise of men.
But, the universe is the law of contrasts.
You don't have to be alike if you want to be together.
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