Guy Mettan (Switzerland) speech at the Global Conference on Multipolarity
Guy Mettan (Switzerland) – politician, political scientist and journalist, the founder of the Swiss Press Club in Geneva.
February 24, 2022 will go down in history. Because, beyond the special military operation in Ukraine, this day marks the moment when Russia, and with it the whole of the global South, said a clear and irreversible no to Western hegemony under American influence. This day therefore marks the beginning of the end of the unipolar world order and the beginning of the multipolar international order that has been in the making since the creation of the BRICs in 2001, the BRICS in 2011 and the expansion of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in 2021 The application of many more countries to join these organizations since 2022 confirms and accelerates this trend.
Until last year, it was the political West that dictated its will to the rest of the world.
Since then, the world's center of gravity has shifted both to the East, the Middle East and Asia, and to the South, Africa and Latin America. Everywhere voices are being raised to demand a world order that is more just, more sustainable and more in keeping with the weight of the peoples, continents and civilizations that make up the human universe.
Having said this, it is now important to prepare for the future, and therefore to strengthen and accelerate the process underway, knowing that we are only at the beginning and that there is still a long way to go to achieve a world order that is more balanced, more peaceful, and more respectful of the civilizational poles that make it up.
The West has not said its last word and will not easily accept to share its power.
The fight for a multipolar world will take place in all fields, economic, monetary, financial, security and military, but also on the ideological, scientific, intellectual, and cultural terrain.
It is this field that interests us today. It is on this ground that we should concentrate our efforts in the framework of our activities.
Indeed, it happens that the West, thanks to the advantages accumulated during decades, still has a quasi-monopoly of the thought and the action with the world public opinions and politics. It masters both the technical means, the main mass media and social networks, the financial means, the human resources - networks of NGOs, private and public international organizations such as the G7, the WEF and the OECD, think tanks, academic experts, and large multinational companies - as well as a common language, English, to impose its narrative and its "values" almost everywhere in the world. The mastery of the tools of global soft power allows it, precisely, to monopolize and instrumentalize the values of which it claims to be the sole inventor and defender - democracy, freedom, human rights, civil society, the rule of law, the international community - to its sole benefit.
I believe that it is now time to criticize this fraudulent and misleading appropriation of these values and to develop concepts, ideas, philosophical, political, and moral principles that are just as universal, but which have not yet been able to flourish as a result of the hegemony of Western conceptions of the world and of life in society.
It is not a question here of imposing anything, nor of speaking on behalf of others. But I note that the "reservoir of values" and the field of reflection is immense. But on a personal level, I would be interested in knowing more about the potential of the word peace, for example, which is expressed in Russian by two words, and therefore two different concepts. A few years ago in Beijing, a traditional painter explained to me that the Chinese know five meanings of freedom, whereas the West reduces it to one, the individual right to vote. The Japanese notion of wa, of social harmony, is unknown in the West, as are the Chinese concepts of tianxia and government at the service of the people's well-being. And who knows that one of the first charters of human rights was promulgated in Mali in 1235 (the Kuruganfuga Charter)?
There is therefore a need to develop the major principles on which the multipolar world should be based and articulated, knowing that these principles cannot be reduced to a simple copy and paste of Western concepts.
A second field of reflection that we should tackle concerns the organization, the form, the contours of this multipolar order that we are calling for. This is a much more political and concrete aspect. Faced with the collective West, which forms a political group that occupies the field in international organizations and defines the norms of international public and private law to its sole advantage, it is a matter of building an organized "global South", with its network of think tanks, NGOs, diplomats, embassies, journalists and media, which can make the voice of the multipolar world heard not only at the UN and in traditional international forums, but also on the stages and through the intermediary of new and independent organizations.
In short, I believe that it is now time for the proponents of the multipolar world to develop their own soft power and build their own organizations in order to gain strength in all possible arenas. The time for affirmative thinking and action has come.
Un processus irréversible à renforcer
Un processo irreversibile da rafforzare
Un proceso irreversible que hay que reforzar
Een onomkeerbaar proces dat moet worden versterkt
Ein unumkehrbarer Prozess, der verstärkt werden muss
