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What follows is my English translation of an article by Jacopo Brogi, Alessandro Fanetti and Konrad Nobile, with the collaboration of Fabio Bonciani, published on ComeDonChisciotte.org yesterday, 22nd May 2024. (All formatting original).
Ebrahim Raisi and Qasem Soleimani.
While working on the release of this interview, we learn of the incident involving the helicopter in which Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and East Azerbaijan Governor Malek Rahmati were travelling. With them were General Mehdi Mousavi and Tabriz Friday prayer leader Mohammadali Al-Hashem. All lost their lives. The investigation is ongoing.
Just a few hours earlier, we had spoken exclusively about Raisi and much more with journalist and geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar, who was visiting Italy for the presentation of his latest book “Raging Twenties: Great Power Politics Meets Techno-Feudalism”, just published in Italy (Anteo Edizioni, 2024).
Raisi and the central role of Iran together with Russia and China in the bloc facing the Anglo-American globalist power. We offer you the full text, enriched by the presentation of the book - edited by Prof. Lorenzo Maria Pacini, philosopher and expert in geopolitics and international relations - held on 17 May in Bologna at the Casa di Quartiere Villa Paradiso, in the presence of Escobar himself.
Where does the world we are experiencing come from? Are there alternatives to widespread and systematic impoverishment and war?
According to Escobar, we are going through a hairpin turn in history, the most dangerous one. Because the dominant powers in the West do not accept their waning grip on the globe and have no plan B, but only plan A: which is against us. That is why it is important to watch and understand how states-civilisations, which in their diversity aim at a multipolar world, move. What does this mean? Escobar will help us find out.
China, Russia, Iran. Know them better to try to decipher the future, because - like it or not - it will also be ours.
Welcome to Italy Mr. Escobar, and thank you for accepting this interview for ComeDonChisciotte. Let's get straight to the point: 1991/2021 - What have thirty years of Anglo-American unipolarity meant for the world and societies?
“With the collapse of the Soviet Union they had a very clear project and it was the project of the ‘indispensable nation’, with a completely unipolar world of international relations, theoretically and academically with a mediocre notion of the ‘End of History’ and neoliberalism in a state of total exacerbation and a total commodification of life. This has been the project since the 1990s, already since the Clinton years, let's call it the ‘go-go Clinton Era’, a ‘go-go’, a dance, with a very popular and very seductive character, with extremely vigorous and anti-people policies, above all. In the middle of the project, at the beginning of the millennium, we had 9/11, which - like the Kennedy assassination - is a story about which we will never know the truth; what we do know is that the official version is completely absurd.
But 9/11, from the point of view of a new Pearl Harbor was planned, they already had Plan A for the whole story, which was to eliminate Israel's opponents in West Asia, as Paul Wolfowitz said at the time: ‘we are the new OPEC’. Which meant getting to control the oil of the Persian Gulf and West Asia, having no other competitors. Because Russia and China were lagging behind at the time.
At the beginning of the millennium, Beijing was developing at impressive rates: 10, 12, 14% per year; then entry into the World Trade Organisation, in 2001, a little before 9/11. In Russia, Putin was elected in 2000. His very complicated project to heal the Russian economy and society was only in its first year.
The Neocons were the American government, but it is more appropriate to call it the ‘Cheney regime’, because the big decision-maker in Washington at the time was Dick Cheney, it was not Bush, Bush had no vision, not even a tactical, not to say strategic vision of this project, but Cheney was one of them, the Neocons: Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, Robert Kagan a kind of great theorist.
From the very beginning, after 9/11, they unveiled their strategy from the bombing of Afghanistan in October 2001 - I remember this as I was there, we were obliged to go through Washington - and then by November they were already discussing the invasion of Iraq in the Pentagon. And by December they had already made the decision: ‘let's go and invade Iraq’.
Iraq was the first piece in this domino. Afghanistan was a pretext, Iraq was not. Iraq was on the list: Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, and that was already the first big strategic mistake. They did not know the complex social and anthropological organisation of Iraq, they did not imagine that there would be opposition to an American occupation and they did not see this even at the beginning, a few days after the fall of Saddam and his statue in Firdos Square. The first big demonstration in Baghdad was a joint Sunni and Shia demonstration. All together they said: ‘Americans out!’. And evidently the Neocons in Washington did not expect this: from the very beginning they encountered popular civil opposition, but also Sunni military opposition and later Shia opposition as well.
The Shia opposition directly after 2004 with Ayatollah Ay Aal-Sistani as its great leader. Aal-Sistani told the Americans: ‘If you come here and kick out my commanders, I will put 100,000 people on the streets... just like that, in a moment, and you will be kicked out!’ The Americans realised that they had been caught in a trap, by the Sunni resistance and guerrillas in the triangle of death - as they called it at the time - i.e. Ramadi, Falluja and Baghdad, and at the same time by the Shia resistance.
It can be said that the collapse of the project of total, unilateral domination began as early as 2003/2004, after evidently a few more adventures in Syria, Libya. Libya was essentially a NATO adventure; the attempts to destabilise this whole axis including Hezbollah in Lebanon, the attacks against Iran, at least rhetorical attacks that were practically daily at that time, when Rumsfeld (Undersecretary of Defence under Bush jr., ed.) was saying ‘real men go to Teheran’ and all this was around 2005/2006.
With Obama's arrival, they recalibrated the process. We all thought Obama was really a progressive, a liberal, an anti-war and one who could lead a government directed towards the needs of the masses, the American middle classes. No. His first act as president in early 2009 was: more troops, more weapons, more soldiers in Afghanistan. This was his first act in foreign policy. And a few months later, already in 2010, another recalibration: they came up with a concept called Pivot to Asia, which was not Hillary Clinton's idea, but that of a member of the State Department. And who is back there today: Kurt Campbell. The absurdity of this concept was the main node of this American Silk Road: Afghanistan. An occupied and warring country as the hub of Eurasia. How was such a thing sustainable? Everything was normal for them, at least in 2010/2011.
In the meantime, Russia and China were already at a higher stage in terms of general reorganisation, and - especially in Russia - economic development and newfound domestic strength: a reform in the army, better wages, lower unemployment. These were the years after Putin's famous speech in Munich in 2007, when he told the Atlanticist elite that this whole unipolar world thing is no good for us, we need to sit down together, discuss new international power relations.
Between 2013/2014, the New Silk Roads that were launched by Xi Jinping in Astana, Kazakhstan, and afterwards in Jakarta: this does not only mean China's commercial reorganisation with its neighbours, but a real geopolitical agenda; it can be said that the New Silk Road (BRI [Belt and Road Initiative) has been, is - and will be - China's foreign policy for the coming decades.
The Americans do not understand anything about this concept of the Silk Road, which is a concept of aggregation, without wanting to impose one's values on one's trading partners; it means doing business with everyone, what more Chinese style is there than that?
So, without lobbying and without internal interference: from African countries to Central Asian countries, West Asian countries, etc. .
And in 2014 the usual moves from the Empire: Maidan Square in Kiev was something that had been in gestation for a few years, the original idea can be said to have been Brzezinski's in the 1990s: if we attack Ukraine and divide it from Russia, Moscow will never be a great power - and everyone - in Washington - has absorbed this concept, which is fundamentally wrong, because - for example - it makes no distinction between the various Ukrainians that exist. Brzezinski did not consider the lands of Novorossiya, of eastern Ukraine, he thought of the Ukraine of Kiev.
The Russians, at that time, did not yet have the adequate firepower to go against Maidan and the whole coup of 2014, they needed to wait for ideal conditions, they did not have such a strong economy, as the one of 2022 would become. [They were] Forced to wait, for eight years.
Originally, they did not want to: the concept of the special military operation was to return to Ukraine and reoccupy Russian land. Putin is a legalitarian, he didn't like the idea, he was forced, and this is exactly what he told Xi Jinping when they met before the special military operation, when Putin personally told Xi: ‘They are forcing my hand, I am forced to intervene or there will be a blitzkrieg. 10,000 Ukrainian soldiers with NATO weapons and it will be a bloodbath in New Russia. I cannot allow that.’
Xi didn't say yes, he didn't say he agreed, but he understood the motivation and the very complicated geopolitical game Putin was obliged to play.
So, eight years to wait for the ideal conditions to enter Ukraine, with a very specific idea and not an expansive idea. The original idea was: we have a harmful state on our borders that is against our values, that has been constantly killing Russian-speaking citizens for years, we need a process of denazification and demilitarisation and then to place them near the border with Poland, away from the Russian Federation.
That was the original idea. It took the Russians at least a year to realise that it was absolutely impossible to implement it, because in the end it was no longer a military operation: it was a war. A war by the United States and the whole of NATO - using the Ukrainians - against Russia and also against Europe in terms of completely vassalizing Europe, and then against China because it's a war against the trade corridors of the New Silk Roads.
And now we can say that there will be perhaps a new date for the final collapse of the unilateral project, because today we have a direct battlefield clash between the non-NATO yet NATO army, the most powerful, against the Russian army. And NATO is losing.
Everyone knows that it is a matter of time, how far the Russians will go. Odessa, Transnistria... no no... we recover Kherson and Zaporižžja, but only Putin knows that.
The difference, compared to the beginning of the special military operation, is that for everything the westerners launched against Russia, you could say that the backlash was intergalactic: they had no plan B, plan A was always the same. Let's go kick Russia out of SWIFT, let's collapse the Russian economy, our Ukrainian-NATO super army goes and defeats the Russian army, let's go and isolate Russia from the whole planet.
They weren't thinking about the rest of the planet, they were thinking about the West, the NATO sphere of influence.
And obviously the backlash was absolutely enormous and this is the situation where we are now: they still have no plan B, only terrorist attacks and attacks on civilian targets in the Russian Federation.
Internally, the Russians dominate everything and they dominate the tempo and what they want to do and the remark, for example, by the Russian representative at the UN speaks volumes: the only thing we want to negotiate is the procedure for surrender, there is nothing else to negotiate and Lavrov, who is a gentleman of diplomacy and the most competent diplomat on the planet, is already saying exactly the same, that a dialogue with the Americans is impossible.
The only thing the Americans understand is a blatant defeat. There is nothing to negotiate”.
In order not to lose, what is and will the USA be willing to do?
“This is exactly our great dilemma, it is the dilemma of the whole planet. Because we have a rational actor who is the Russian actor, as are the Chinese actors, as are the Iranian actors, and - on the other side - we have psychopaths, lunatics, irrationals of all kinds, in all these organisations in the Washington system, in Virginia, the military industrial complex, the academy, the think tanks ... theirs is a completely one-sided view, unable to admit huge tactical and strategic mistakes that they have made since the beginning of the millennium.
That is the problem, they are now lions who are surrounded and therefore much more dangerous. This is our real problem, the problem of the global majority, because these lions can be unleashed at any moment, they are an irrational faction that has no political, strategic, diplomatic calculation, especially the people inside the Biden administration who still have 6 months of power ahead of them”.
In your opinion, would a Trump administration have a different attitude?
“With Trump, the attitude will be different, if Trump is elected: we will have a huge reduction in the current pressure and dangers, however, it can be said that the emphasis of the US administration will shift from Russia to China; it will not be warlike as the current administration, it will be a geo-economic gendarme and the only tactic and strategy of the empire will be to launch a gigantic package of sanctions against China, right away.
The Chinese are prepared, they know perfectly well that they are the next big target of a likely Trump government. And this is rightly what Putin and Xi discussed a few days ago: about the biggest problems on the planet and afterwards, at the end of the night, they had a specific meeting about Ukraine and all the consequences and scenarios related to the ongoing conflict. And from our point of view of the Global South, of the Global Majority, at least we have two extremely rational, well-prepared, adult state actors who understand the difficulty and danger of the historical moment and the danger of the people currently leading Washington. Trump is a businessman, a hope for everyone, but we don't know if that will be enough”.
Recently, the US has allocated as much as $95 billion to Ukraine ($61 billion), Israel and Taiwan. These are the red lines to stop the new multipolar world. So if China is the big target, is there a risk of a conflict towards Taiwan?
“No. First of all, people in Washington - especially think tanks - do not understand the Taiwan phenomenon and do not understand the interdependent link between Taiwan and mainland China. These economies are completely interdependent at the level of technology, at the level of exchange of engineers... they speak the same language, they have the same culture, everything.
The key issue is obviously the American obsession with their democracy and so-called human rights, which is now just a slogan.
You can talk about democracy and human rights in China too, but the Chinese have their own version of democracy and human rights, but the US doesn't respect it, because it has to be western neo-liberal democracy that has to apply to the whole planet. And Russia, or China, or Iran following their own models, which also involve popular participation, are not respected.
The Americans do not understand that, from the very beginning, for the Chinese leadership - that is, with Deng Xiaoping - since the late 1970s / early 1980s, the Taiwan-related project is a long-term one, a peaceful reunification with a symbolic date: 2049. They are in no hurry; it could become a large autonomy like Hong Kong or Macao, for example. In Hong Kong they say ‘one country, two systems’. Taiwan may perhaps become a three-system country. But for big military and foreign policy decisions, the decisions will come from Beijing and not Taipei, that is the difference. Life, for the people living in Taiwan, will not change much. For the military industrial complex in Washington, it is impossible to understand this process.
Their only obsession is what to do to undermine China from within. To create a problem that fundamentally does not exist. They have tried in Tibet, they have tried in Xinjiang, they are trying not only directly with Taiwan, but also with the Philippines, i.e. with a new old ally to undermine China in the South Sea, while Taipei is seen as the means to disrupt Beijing's economic, geo-economic and geopolitical stability; that is all the Americans are interested in and the Chinese know this very well. And they also know that Russia then absolutely has the idea that there is only one China. And that its main ally, the great ally of today's China is Russia, and this is the main element in this 2024, the first year of the BRICS expansion with Russian chairmanship and with the possibility of further enlargement after the Kazan summit next October. There will be a queue of at least 40 countries wanting to join. One can already say that in the future, the new united nations with decision-making power, with geo-economic firepower, will be the 15-, 20- or 25-nation BRICS”.
Iran is fundamental for the construction of the Islamic pole, which however is struggling to emerge due to Israel's role in the region. How do you see the position of Tehran and the axis of resistance in the Middle Eastern mosaic today, compared to the rest of the Muslim world?
“This is exactly what the Chinese and Russians already understood before everyone else: it is the main reason that led Iran to be part of the BRICS and – at the same time – also for wanting to include Saudi Arabia. And they did the whole process in just a few months. The Russians spoke to the Iranians, then to the Saudis; they put Iran and the Saudis at the same table to talk and then they told the Chinese: They are already talking together, now you think about it... So here is Beijing and here is the agreement, diplomatic relations and then... today the two states are already members of the new BRICS.
All this in less than a year: absolutely extraordinary. The only ones equipped with this soft power, but also with hard power to succeed in such a complex operation are the Russians and the Chinese. The Russians and the Chinese together: and this is even more important.
When the Chinese began the process of rapprochement of diplomatic relations between Iranians and Saudis, the Americans knew nothing, they learned it by reading the newspapers, we are talking about the American intelligence. Clearly, this has created a huge problem for Mohammad bin Salman, who is now a target of US intelligence.
Iran's power comes from this very pragmatic administration of Raisi, very programmatic, extremely pragmatic, very competent, diplomatically of the highest profile. It has built an extremely strong war industry and Americans did not expect it to reach this level.
To defend sovereignty you need to have an army, this is Lesson No. 1 of geopolitics. And these three countries have three very strong armies: Russia, China and Iran.
So, it can be said that for Russia and China – and at different levels – Iran is the main player for the Islamic world.
In Iran there is a Shiite system and this system is legitimizing itself before all the Sunni populations of the planet, especially after the response to Israel's recent attack on the Iranian Consulate in Damascus.
The organization of the Iranian response was a spectacle from the military point of view, diplomatic point of view, from the point of view of timing, everything...
The Iranians have also created a soft power Iran in the Islamic world, which is a soft power that also includes the forces of what we call the ‘axis of resistance’: the Palestinian faction, the Syrians, Hashd al-Shaabi and all the militias in the Iraq, Hasan Nasr Allah and Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, who are watched by the entire Islamic world, from Nigeria to Indonesia. They are valiant, these are warriors, they are defending the values of Islam. And the leadership of this axis is evidently an Iranian leadership that was implemented by General Soleimani. And we always return to the almost immeasurable importance of General Soleimani, because he had thought of this long-term strategy, a strategy for this decade and also for the next decade; all this was conceived, let's say ten years ago, five years ago, before his assassination in 2020.
It is very interesting to see the continuity and how solid this Iranian idea of Iranian power at the highest level is throughout Eurasia, throughout the Islamic world and also in the global majority.
Iran is highly respected in Africa, in Latin America, in south-east Asia, not only in the Islamic world.
Only States - Civilizations are capable of holding and developing such a complex position on different levels and now we are lucky because we have three: Russia, China and Iran”.
Speaking of systems: the Western model is technocratic and responds to the wishes of a handful of multinationals. How is the BRICS model different and how much does the national sovereignty of individual states weigh in this emerging model?
“It can be said that we are at the beginning of an extremely complex process, something that Sergey Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister, says practically every week: first we need to welcome the new BRICS members, get them settled in, then develop all these multilateral organisations that work in parallel with the BRICS, like: the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO); all the Chinese New Silk Routes projects; the EurAsian Economic Union (EAEU) which is the official Russian terminology for expansion across Eurasia; the International North-South Transport Corridor (INSTC) which is a kind of New Silk Road for Russia, Iran and India. A variant of the Indian Silk Road using the port of Chabahar in southern Iran.
The challenge is to configure all these multilateral organisations to work together, ideally at the same table. It is extremely complicated, but we already have some signs. This week [last week] Putin explicitly said that he has already talked about the official relationship of the BRICS with the SCO in Shanghai; one can say that already in the coming year BRICS and SCO will be able to work much closer than today, that is crucial. And the Eurasian Economic Union also, the two main players are Russia and Kazakhstan, and Kazakhstan is also a member of the SCO.
It's a big chessboard, a big puzzle, and the two main players are the Russians and the Chinese, because they are the leaders of the BRICS, the leaders of the SCO, the leaders of multipolar world building.
For example, the whole issue of de-dollarisation is extremely complex. The main idea on the alternative to the dollar is essentially a Russian idea that, if it is approved by the Ministry of Finance - which seems to like it - will be presented to the other BRICS next June; to start a payment system with this new unit of value, and this is something that was not thought possible until a few months ago.”
So it will be a payment system and not a single currency?
“No, not a single currency. The single currency will come at a much more advanced stage. This will be a system that has been called unpolitical money. ‘Unpolitical money’, for a cross-border payment system, crossing borders: initially with the BRICS countries and later with the possibility of expanding it to the rest of the global South. This is something that was not thought of until a few months ago and the speed of creating a new concept, showing it to the major players, already talking to the Chinese... the Chinese say interesting but we need to do some testing etc. This is already extraordinary and everything goes in parallel: the geopolitical front which is always the setting up of the system, at the highest level by Russia and China, and then explaining it to the rest of the global South; what the interests are and what they are doing geo-economically, explaining it to all the players who want a system no longer dependent on the US dollar. And this is at the heart of creating a new system.
Lesson No. 1: you cannot make a new system using the currency of the enemy”.
Pepe Escobar during the conference on 17th May [2024].
Finance, Propaganda, Technology and War. These are the only pillars and nuclear power of the West, which is denying itself, while the East now has everything to win the global challenge: millennial culture, demography, real economy and energy. Vital energy versus technocratic decadence. The unipolar world, in order to win the war, will certainly have no qualms about trying to send young Europeans, including Italians, to the front. How will it end?
“Young Europeans do not have the discipline of young Russians or Iranians and above all the understanding of what a war is and whom they go to war for. Imagine young Italians today going to war for Ursula von der Leyen: it is absolutely impossible - and neither is the current Italian government.
Will the French go to war for Macron? No. The British for Sunak? No. The problem is that this elite, in its cosmic mediocrity, is incapable of seeing not only its own mediocrity, but the mediocrity of what it can propose to its own populations: in Italy, in England, in France.
It is a highly complex problem, anthropological, cultural, educational... disaggregation of education standards, this platform of egalitarianism of everything, where there is no competence, no real meritocracy; the critical spirit is seen as something subversive; Cancel Culture, Wokeism, all this is a kind of ‘big package’. And it is the result of decades, from the early 1980s onwards, at least since the Clinton era, and this has been transferred to all the big European countries that have absorbed it directly.
The decline of Europe's best universities began at least thirty years ago, not yesterday. Without talking about conspiracy theories, it is clear that one can say that there is an extremely precise agenda behind this ‘mass dumbing down’, a dumbing down that goes from the ordinary citizen to the great academic, who is paid not to really say what he is researching, what he is doing, but he is paid. And it is part of the great process of commodification of life, everything is a commodity and this is neoliberalism at its peak, at its peak.
The difference is that now you can compare this whole process with the collapse of geopolitical domination and geo-economic domination, and military domination of this whole system. And evidently, going back to the theme addressed earlier: today they are much more dangerous because they see themselves as lost... they never have a plan B or a plan C, and that is our biggest problem.”
—
Pepe Escobar. A Brazilian-born journalist, columnist and international political analyst, he covers Eurasia and the Global South for numerous publications, constantly moving between the Americas, Europe and Asia.
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Lorenzo Maria Pacini (*) – “Thank you all for being here this evening, thank you to the coordination who invited us because it is really a wonderful occasion in this Pepe Escobar trip to Italy. We wanted to make a stop in Bologna because it seemed right to us. Bologna is a city that is the capital of Italian culture, of its institutional and academic formation and also of a great political history. So I will take a few minutes to introduce this work by Pepe Escobar, but also, more generally, to talk about this so-called transition towards a multipolar world that we hear more and more about and which therefore requires our attention, as well as the attention that the so-called mainstream media, from the Italian to the international press, are already dedicating to it.
It was precisely when we chose to publish this first book by Pepe - the next one will be ready around September and we will organise other events throughout Italy - that we asked ourselves this question: how can we get such an important concept as the multipolar world across to as many people as possible?
Let's be clear, we have no pretensions to exhaustiveness and this is certainly not the most suitable venue, but we felt it was only right to launch some critical reflections that would allow all readers to come up with questions and maybe even find answers. So, I will tell you just two things about the book and then we will let Pepe speak, but providing some concepts that I believe are important to understand his speech as well. First of all, consider that the work, so as to give us an image and an outline of how it is composed, starts from the analysis of that 2020 that we all know very well and that marked a before and an after, a new watershed in history and from which changes were triggered at many levels throughout the world that led - it is quite evident - to a very different world. And this happened in the micro in our individual lives, as well as in the macro of the large social systems on a global level: this transition has been fundamental, because what started in 2020 has a lot to do with what we see today, it has a lot to do with a surveillance techno-capitalism, it has a lot to do with the problems that afflict the Italian economy, but more generally all over Europe and not only that, it has a lot to do with the wars that are going on, it has a lot to do with that whole long series of things that the systems of power continue to foreshadow for us, at alternate times, according to logics that sometimes pass through the question of nature and ecology, when they pass through ethnic issues, when they touch on those that have to do with our wallets, and so on.
Lorenzo Maria Pacini.
So that's what the book is about, and that's also what Pepe will tell us: what has actually already started, what has happened, we might say, on the positive side, since those four years ago. Because we did not only see the lockdowns of the so-called pandemic, we did not only see the economy go down, we did not only see social control and so on, we saw - from a certain part of the world - the international balances begin to completely overturn and a mechanism that is - let me say - absolutely irrevocable started, a mechanism that is absolutely irrevocable. The change that has begun, that we are seeing in the world, cannot turn back and - I would say - also fortunately, because as we Italians say - dear Pepe - ‘it was better when it was worse’.
The problems were there before, but now we have the opportunity to see them and also to think about how to solve them differently. So I leave you with just two ideas that will be a guide to understanding what Pepe will tell us, which are geopolitics and multipolarism. Geopolitics, which is a science that - mind you - you hear about more or less everywhere today and it is also full of people who improvise, the so-called geopolitician, and then maybe you really see a very significant and important confusion. Geopolitics is a science of civilisations, i.e. it explains how civilisations interact with each other and so - you will say to me - what does civilisation mean?
Because, put like that, it can sound like everything and nothing. Geopolitics is not international politics or international political economy, geopolitics is not anthropogeography or ethnography, geopolitics is something that mixes many of these things, plus a concept that lies at the heart of the transformation we are experiencing.
Since 1648, with the Peace of Westphalia that ended the 30 Years' War and basically initiated that European arrangement with the countries we know today and which then also gave rise to the expansion of colonialism into Africa and South America, what is now called the global south.
In the 20th century we invented a rather derogatory term: ‘Third World’. Just to create an extra class in a system that had enough superstructures. And from then on, this formatting began by creating the concept of the state, the state as we know it today, as some of you may have studied it at school and university. The State that basically recognises itself by a territory with people living there and giving themselves a law, a legal form, and exercising a word that makes us Italians a bit sick to our stomachs: Sovereignty.
That thing that from your smiling faces - we all have quite the same perception - is not quite so, how should I put it, perceived. Why sovereignty? The Germans would say Realpolitik: the real possibility of exercising power. That is, I decide to do something or not to do it, whether it is in my domestic policy, whether it is in foreign policy, whether it is in social policy and so on. From then on, this concept becomes more and more popular and the modern states are created; we arrive in the course of history at the period of the 19th century where another concept is introduced that becomes fundamental to start the 20th century, which will be the famous Short Century, where everything changed.
The concept of nation, ‘the nation’ is no longer something tied to territory, but combines an extra element that was previously, to a large extent, taken for granted: the need for a cultural foundation. By the way, the concept of ‘nation’ is an exquisitely Italian concept, Mazzini was the first theoriser of the concept of nation that was linked to the concept of state - and so it was created, the Unification of Italy that was an example of this: the need to have a territory but also an identity and the question of identity, of national identity, of who we are not only ethnically, anagraphically, in our political ideas, in our religious beliefs, political or otherwise, but who we are as a social unit. In the 20th century, however, all this is disrupted: the First and Second World Wars, but more so what happens after the Second World War, makes us rethink everything.
Bologna, 17 May 2024, Casa di Quartiere Villa Paradiso: several attendees at the conference by Pepe Escobar and Lorenzo Maria Pacini.
Because - let's think of Italy - national sovereignty is lost, becoming a colony, officially a protectorate of the United States of America, whose imposition in Europe - but not only in Europe - is becoming ever stronger, expansive, hegemonic, and therefore it is no longer: our culture, our identity, our territory; this is true for so many other states. But it becomes: our territory, our History, our people with other governments, other cultures, other influences of various kinds that go, mind you, not to interact and mingle as has always happened (Italy, moreover, is par excellence a multicultural port in History, the Mediterranean has been the cradle of one of the greatest civilisations in History, the Italic civilisation, and of many others). But it is a political, decision-making control: we can no longer decide what is an economic policy line, what is a cultural guide, what are the principles and values on which to base our society.
This passage becomes fundamental, fundamental to the need - especially since the 1990s - to think differently about the world. Why?
Because as we all know, we had the Cold War, the period of the so-called bipolarism which was really a psychopathology on an international level, because you had the reds and the blues waging war against each other... the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics - with all the other countries scattered above and below - which were of socialist and Marxist ideology, and on the other side the so-called free world, the United States of America with liberal ideology.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, we enter a unipolar phase, the one that we can ideally indicate between the collapse of the Berlin Wall in ‘89 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in '91/'92 . It is the phase in which the dominion of the United States becomes total over the world, so much so that the End of History is proclaimed by one of the greatest ideologues of the American government, Francis Fukuyama; it speaks of the end of a world that was no longer that of the various nation-states, but that of a single state that globalised and absorbed everything else within it. And at this stage, in these years, someone began to think in an alternative way.
In 1983, a very young Soviet student, Aleksandr Dugin, drafted the first edition, the very first pages of what was to be called the ‘Theory of the Multipolar World’ that we are discussing today. So what is this transition that is being made? We move on to a new concept for understanding the world: the concept of civilisation, a structured system by which people organise their lives, their values, their culture. And so it is no longer just a question of territorial borders, it is no longer a question of which law governs the state, which legal system we have, whether it is a democratic republic, whether it is a monarchy, whether it is an isolated little state or whether it is a giant world power. It is no longer even a question of nationhood, because history has shown us, the influence that can be wielded through and above all the instruments of propaganda, mean that even what is not culturally something, can forcibly become so. And so public opinion is manipulated, beliefs, traditions are influenced, obliterated, completely obliterated, annihilated from the pages of History, and so it becomes necessary to base a new world on something stronger, deeper, more deeply rooted, and so we begin to study, to identify what these civilisations are, how on earth peoples have given birth, have developed, and where we can place them on our ideal map, which then becomes an existential map, a map of values, which then is not just that political boundary drawn on a map, but perhaps that of a people that is divided by a state boundary, or those of nation states that find themselves completely under the hegemony and factual control of other states.
So, in this passage, a new model can be understood (and this becomes really evident from 2021): a nation-state, that is, a state-civilisation. In other words, we begin to think that the world can truly function by understanding how different models of civilisation are born, develop and interact, each of which must be able to have the freedom to self-determine, to grow, to develop, to make its own way, to construct its own languages, its own values, its own beliefs, even if these no longer follow the driving force, the leadership, as we would say in English, of a single country or a single civilisation, but each beginning to regain its own dignity. And so, you really enter what becomes a multipolar phase, that is, you begin to think of these civilisations as poles.
And what is a pole?
Think of a sphere, a Platonic solid, a sphere has an ideal central axis, which acts as a pivot, and around this axis the sphere rotates, whatever form you want a sphere to rotate, a sphere that rotates on itself means that it does not depend on other poles, other points that make it rotate; It does not need a system to push it, it does not need to be supported by anything else, it is independent, it is sovereign, it is autonomous, it makes its own law, which is not the one imposed by the coloniser, which is not the one imposed by the market of transnational finance that dominates, especially in the 20th century, politics, overturning the balance that existed between politics - as Aristotle taught - which is taking care of the common good and the economy, which was the activity that was carried out to achieve that common good, that care that was necessary. And from this, we really move on to thinking, to having the possibility of several poles interacting with each other on a balance, looking at each other with respect, which - mind you - does not mean being all equally great, because I challenge you to compare, I don't know, the military power of the United States of America with the city of Bologna, or the economy of China with that of the State of San Marino. It is clear that there is a disproportion: one is big, one is small.
So it is that the twentieth century gave us something called international law, which would really exist if there were really the possibility of having a relationship of equals between subjects interacting with each other, but this really doesn't exist, on the contrary, in the twentieth century we have reinforced this imbalance by inventing the so-called instruments of deterrence which basically boil down to: ‘I have the biggest gun and therefore I win’.
Because when, after the Second World War, we found ourselves with atomic weapons that really posed the possibility of exterminating mankind and destroying this planet, we began to say that maybe it was time to be quiet; wars have not ended but have only changed the way they happen and, more importantly, we began to say that whoever has the atomic weapon is perhaps a little stronger than the other, because if I threaten you with a gun and you threaten me with a pebble, the gun wins. And this very important variation, really brings us towards the need to consider how for so long we have based international relations, international relationships, on systems of power play based on what was fundamentally the notion that one civilisation was better than the other and that it had - for this reason - to dominate, to prevaricate, to influence the other and where this was perhaps not accepted, very simply the ethnic group, the local population was exterminated and something new was done.
We have had well-known cases in history, even in Italy. So, if we really want to enter - and then I'll pass the floor to Pepe - within this multipolar world, this transition, becoming aware of how complicated it is to understand the world from a multipolar perspective, how complicated it is to move on to something that is already and not yet, because we theorize it, we grasp it, we talk about it, but then we look around and many times we say: we're not there yet, on the contrary. In many things in our lives, in many parts of the world, systems of hegemony that we know well continue to function, I believe that with the last two recent wars we are all realizing this.
The positions taken by Italy are in compliance with an imposition that is certainly not ours, the popular one; I imagine that none of you here want to see your young people condemned to fight in Ukraine or Palestine, I would say no. Also because they told us that the most beautiful Constitution in the world - as they said a few years ago - which we then saw being abdicated in the space of a couple of toilet paper Prime Ministerial Decrees broadcast live on Facebook - fundamentally repudiated the war, there was that famous article that said… ‘Italy repudiates war as an instrument of offense against the freedom of other peoples and as a means of resolving international disputes’ (Art.11 Italian Constitution, ed.). That little thing over there, right? Which we have seen is an opinion. So, if we want to deal with opinions, the last step to take is a commitment of a personal nature: let's not make the mistake of falling back into the logic, which belonged so much to the twentieth century, that the wonderful system of delegation, which is one of the fundamental principles of our political order of our State and not only of ours, must be valid eternally. That is, we find someone who thinks like us or almost like us, and we are satisfied. we let that person decide for us.
I believe that a moment is coming in which we realize that if we want this world to change, we must go through a personal commitment, even a courageous choice, against the grain we could say, certainly not easy but fundamental, because a multipolar world can only be achieved by us.
So with these initial suggestions, Pepe, you have the microphone, you have the floor and thank you for being here in Italy with us”.
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Interview article by Jacopo Brogi, Alessandro Fanetti and Konrad Nobile. Fabio Bonciani collaborated.
Alessandro Fanetti, scholar of geopolitics and international relations, author of the book Russia: alla ricerca della Potenza perduta (Edizioni Eiffel, 2021)
Konrad Nobile is a young working student. Activist and militant on various fronts, he collaborates with ComeDonChisciotte.org.
(*) = Bologna – 17th May 2024. Full transcript by Lorenzo Maria Pacini, professor at UniDolomiti in Belluno, philosopher and expert in geopolitics and international relations.
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