Luís Ribeiro (Portugal) speech at the Global Conference on Multipolarity
Luís Ribeiro (Portugal) – Journalist and Geopolitical Analyst – speaks for the Global Conference on Multipolarity (29.04.2023).
Good afternoon everyone, my name is Luís Ribeiro, I am an administrator and founder of the social networks “Geopolitics in Portuguese”, I am speaking to you from Portugal and first of all I want to thank you for the invitation to participate in this conference on Global Multipolarity, it is a It is an honor to be able to participate in this event and I would also like to say that it is exciting to observe firsthand the changes that are taking place in the world and that will bring us a world of new opportunities, even facing some challenges that cannot be ignored.
I think I should start my speech by reminding everyone that our house is one, it's called Earth and we have a duty to take care of it, to live in peace, with friendship and balance between our peoples and nations.
The objective of the Multipolar World must be mutual respect, where peoples must follow their aspirations, their paths, their projects, their political systems and always with the awareness that they must be based on their culture and values.
I am not saying with this that other systems cannot serve as inspiration, but I am saying they can do it through leadership with good examples like success in combat to poverty, because that make us worthy of being followed.
On a planet with 8 billion human beings, almost 30% still suffer from food insecurity, a phenomenon that is unacceptable at a time in our development where we produce enough food for everyone and waste food that would be enough for no one to go hungry.
Hunger, misery, and underdevelopment no longer have excuses to continue to exist and the new Multipolar World could be a cornerstone, to reverse the situation that persists mainly in the global south, where the shadow of Colonialism remains strong and limits its development. Even so, we are experiencing several moments of tension in the world that led us to be cautious and pragmatic.
It has become increasingly difficult to engage in reasonable discussions about the state of the world amid rising international tensions. The present environment of global instability and conflict has emerged over the past fifteen years driven by the growing weakness of the the West, and by the economic growth of developing countries like BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). These states, along with several others, have built the material conditions for their own development projects, including for the next generation of technology, a sector that had previously been the monopoly of Western states and firms through the World Trade Organization’s intellectual property rights regime. Alongside the BRICS, the construction of regional trade and development projects in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that are not controlled by the Western states or Western-dominated institutions – including the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (2001) the Belt and Road Initiative (2013), the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (2011), and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (2022) – heralds the emergence of a new international economic order that we now call Global Multipolarity.
Since the world financial crisis of 2008, nothing kept the same, the United States and its NATO partners have become aware that their hegemonic status in the world has deteriorated. This decline is the consequence of three key forms of overreach: first, military overreach through both enormous military expenditure and warfare; second, financial overreach caused by the rampant waste of social wealth into the unproductive financial sector along with the widespread imposition of sanctions, dollar hegemony, and control of international financial mechanisms (such as SWIFT); and, third, economic overreach, due to the investment and tax strike of a small part of the world’s population, who are solely fixated on filling their already immense private bank accounts. This overreach has led to the fragility of the Western states, which are less able to exercise their authority around the world and cannot abuse of their power. In reaction to their own weakness and the new developments in the Global South, the United States has led its allies in launching a comprehensive pressure campaign against what it considers to be its ‘near peer rivals’, namely China and Russia. This hostile foreign policy, which includes a trade war, unilateral sanctions, aggressive diplomacy, and military operations, is now commonly known as the New Cold War.
Good for us, the new world order that we call Global Multipolarity, have created new Development Banks, new forms of trade without the dollar and without the SWIFT, is securing great part of energy production, have risen in terms of military technology and telecommunication, become more and more independent in the semiconductor development, have dominated the rare earth market, and is in good position in artificial intelligence and internet of things, and even in the space technologies we already have GPS equivalent systems with GLONASS from Russia and BeiDou from China.
Let’s use our Multipolar Power to lift our Global South friends and put an end in the exploratory way of do international relations and put an end in unipolar hegemony.
Regards from Portugal,
No pasarán!
Luís Filipe Ribeiro
