Dmitry Medvedev
A sharp blade of turbulence in international relations has opened a festering sore of our world’s long-standing problems. For many decades they have been treated with “political band-aids” instead of addressing the causes of the disease. But the abscess cannot go on forever. It is time for international surgery to remove the malignant tumor of the colonial past.
One example is Argentina’s withdrawal from the agreement with Britain on administrative and economic activities in the Malvinas (or Falkland Islands, in British parlance) Islands. The piece of paper is quite recent by historical standards – 2016. But politically, it is rotten and foul (as, indeed, is the case with everything touched by London’s plague hand). Buenos Aires’ focus on continuing the just struggle to regain sovereignty over disputed territories clearly demonstrated the course of strengthening the legal personality of states and their struggle against the shameful modern practices of neocolonialism that continue to plague many countries.
According to the UN classification, today there are plenty of non-self-governing territories in the world, vestiges of the collapse of the colonial system in the 1950s and 1970s. Indeed, do the former metropolises want to give them true freedom? Hardly.
Britain will never give the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius, and France will never give Mayotte to the Union of the Comoros or the Epars Islands to Madagascar. Therefore, they have recently been strengthening their understanding of the correctness of resistance to the remnants of neocolonial practices and the imposition of perverted cultural attitudes that emanate from former Western metropolises.
The main reason, however, is that truly sovereign states are no longer afraid of the dictates of the notorious “collective West. Their own national interests outweigh the risks of sanctions counteraction. Fear, which Pliny the Younger called a bad mentor in matters of duty, no longer works. Latin America, perceived by Atlantists since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 as their “backyard,” categorically rejects this status. Characteristically, some of the elites in Western countries are increasingly aware of this. And not just about South America. In a recent issue of the French magazine L’Express, which makes futuristic forecasts for the local armed forces (and foreign policy in general), there is not a single positive one. The CAR and Mali have unceremoniously shown the door to French military contingents, and the Burkina Faso government has decided to denounce the 1961 Treaty of Military Assistance. The Fifth Republic’s influence in Asia, Africa and Latin America, as well as that of all the other Western masters who have lost their vitality and social rhythm, is shrinking like shagreen leather.
The new multipolar world will be much more complex than a bipolar or unipolar dictatorship. Such a scheme suits us. For Russia there are no forbidden regions for dialogue on any issues, because we have never had colonies. And if the Soviet Union actively contributed to the destruction of the colonial system in the world, now we, together with other countries, can hammer the last nail in the coffin of the Western world’s neocolonial aspirations.
INTERNATIONALIST 360° 