International Affairs No. 2, 2018 – Table of Contents

President of the Russian Federation

DEAR FRIENDS, …

in Arms During World War II Is Especially

Important Today” …

AHEAD OF THE 75TH ANNIVERSARY of the Battle of Stalingrad, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Department of History and Records prepared an exhibition of unique documents devoted to this historic event that marked the beginning of a huge turning point in the course of the Great Patriotic War and World War II. The word “Stalingrad” became a symbol of hope for all peoples of the anti-Hitler coalition, as well as of faith in their strength and in the inevitability of the final rout of Nazism.

The exposition features materials from the ministry’s archives testifying to the huge international impact that the Battle of Stalingrad had. It includes messages of greetings from U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, King George VI of the United Kingdom, the prime minister of the Netherlands, and the leaders of other states and military figures. The telegram from President Edvard Beneš of Czechoslovakia, expressing admiration for the heroism and valor of the Red Army, stands out for its sincerity and emotionality. …

THE UNINTERRUPTED ESCALATION of the threat of international terrorism; its expansion under the banner of so-called “political Islam” on the territories of the Near East and North Africa, and of South and Southeast Asia; and its penetration into Europe and Central Asia have shown that the core of the radicalization of hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people, and of their involvement in the cruelest and most violent of crimes on the greatest of scales, is primarily the terrorist ideology – an overarching, universal, all-encompassing, and extremely effective, inexpensive, and accessible instrument of mobilization, recruiting terrorists, planning terrorist attacks, undermining public safety and political security, destabilizing governments and law and order, and furthering terrorist aims.

True, many around the world have flocked to the banner of international terrorism because of money, quick and substantial material benefits – or perhaps some personal power ambitions, twisted psychologies, or even confluences of circumstances. However, the overwhelming majority of ISIL combatants and the similar al-Qaeda groupings were infatuated with and motivated by the deadly ideas, concepts, symbols, and devices justifying the political or geopolitical need for murder and violence in the name of the radical and chimerical concept of the khalifate and its self-propagating territorial emirates. …

THE CREATION of the United Nations marked the end of the World War II and showed the entire world community the way to the peaceful diplomatic settling of conflicts. The work of the organization, created in 1945. was not limited exclusively to questions of war and peace. Prominent among the organization’s aims, as laid down in its charter, was its creators’ desire to strengthen international cooperation, raise the role of diplomacy, and establish dialogue in the processes of international relations.¹ It should be noted here that the area of debate open to the representatives of the UN member countries was formulated to solve a wide variety of problems of the most diverse nature.

Among the problems to be solved within the framework of the United Nations, the following lines of international cooperation are specified in the UN Charter: …

BORIS JOHNSON, British Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, made a working visit to Moscow on December 22, 2017, during which he and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov held talks on a wide range of issues on the bilateral agenda and relevant international topics. Regarding the results of the talks, both ministers spoke at a joint press conference of the need to restore mutual trust, and how the current state of relations between Moscow and London can in no way be called satisfactory. Hence the mutual desire for more effective collaboration in the international arena; in addition, the status of Russia and Britain as permanent members of the UN Security Council requires both this and the restoration of certain norms in bilateral relations. Johnson’s visit was the first trip to Russia by a British foreign secretary in the last ten years. Why have there been no normal relations between Russia and Britain in recent years?

As is well known, this is far from the first decade in which Russian-British relations have been in disarray. This is largely a factor of the general deterioration of relations between Russia and the United States, and the West as a whole. A negative role was played by the New Labour government of Tony Blair supporting U.S. aggression against Iraq in 2003, while Russia – along with France and Germany – was against such military action, which was not sanctioned by the UN Security Council. It is not surprising that our relations began to go downhill after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s June 2003 state visit (planned beforehand) to Great Britain. In the fall of that year, Britain decided to grant refugee status to Boris Berezovsky and Akhmed Zakayev. This was hard to interpret as anything other than a desire to get at least one foot into the …

IN OCTOBER of last year, events took place in China and Russia that were highly significant although not comparable in scale – the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and a session of the Valdai International Discussion Club. There was something that those events had in common – attention paid by the leaderships of the two countries to scientific and technological progress as an extremely powerful factor in the national development and international politics of these great powers.

Of course, the importance attached by the presidents of Russia and China, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, to scientific and technological progress is a continuation of a consistent policy that has spanned several years. However, it is impressive that this importance was stressed practically simultaneously in Moscow and Beijing in a period of transition to a multipolar world. …

IN 1979, during his election campaign, future U.S. president Ronald Reagan, a Republican, spoke of the need to conclude a trade agreement between the countries of North America: “We live on a continent whose three countries possess the assets to make it the strongest, most prosperous and self-sufficient area on Earth. Within the borders of this North American continent are the food, resources, technology, and undeveloped territory which, properly managed, could dramatically improve the quality of life of all its inhabitants.

It is no accident that this unmatched potential for progress and prosperity exists in three countries with such long-standing heritages of free government. A developing closeness among Canada, Mexico, and the United States – a North American accord – would permit achievement of that potential in each country beyond that which I believe any of them – strong as they are – could accomplish in the absence of such cooperation. In fact, the key to our own future security may lie in both Mexico and Canada becoming much stronger countries than they are today…. …

OIL IN RUSSIA plays a special role in putting the economy on a path of steady development that cannot be ignored. These specifics to a very large degree arise from the incredible vastness of the country’s territory.

In addition, it is obvious that the role of oil in Russia cannot be adequately assessed in binary terms alone (“oil vs. scientific and technical progress,” “oil vs. urbanization,” “oil vs. civil society,” etc.), which typically results in judgmental assessment (“resource curse,” “Dutch disease,” “socioeconomic stagnation,” etc.). …

REFORMING the global governance system to make it more efficient is a top item on the world’s agenda. It is essential not only for dealing with various global issues but also for developing the rules and course for the international order and system. It is not only pivotal to the vital interests of all countries, and it is not only a matter of prosperity or decay and life and death of a nation. More importantly, it is a factor of global peace, stability, development, and prosperity, and can be described as the core of our times, something that affects all nations. Although globalization, the development of multipolarity and information technology (IT) penetration are key trends in today’s world and are rapid processes, global governance still lacks efficient mechanisms for dealing with serious challenges. There are various reasons for this.

Firstly, countries are unequally represented in these mechanisms. The world economy is undergoing deep-going transformations. The developed Western economies are growing slowly and are unstable. Meanwhile, emerging-market and developing countries are generally on the rise, they play permanently increasing roles in the world economy and international trade, and their contribution to global economic growth has reached 80%. But the global governance system fails to reflect these changes and remains under Western control. …

Bargaining is a repulsive habit; compromise is one of the highest human virtues.

The difference between the two being that the first is practised on the Continent, the latter in Great Britain. …

IN THE UNITED STATES in the second half of the 20th century, two models that directly contradict each other in content could be distinguished in political conflictology as a branch of political science whose specialists regularly advise government circles. Since the authors of these models did not simply influence but frequently predetermined the foreign policy of the United States, we can also speak of the lines of American foreign policy based on these models.

We therefore have grounds for assuming that the descriptions, characteristics, and estimates of theoretical models of political conflictology in the United States, and their use in practical/applied political conflictology, are directly associated with the implementation of foreign policy and are of great importance not only to scientific circles, but to government institutions active in the system of international relations. Presently, the Russian Federation is actively and – most important – effectively reclaiming its status as a major political force that the United States does it best to oppose. …

INTERNAL political conflicts, the exponential growth of which began long before the 21st century started, have been and remain one of the gravest challenges to the world community. Contrary to the widespread opinion, in the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, the number of violent internal political conflicts prevailed over interstate armed confrontations. After World War II, the trend became obvious: today, there are much more internal political than interstate armed conflicts in the world.¹

According to the Workgroup for Studies of Causes of Wars (AKUF) at the University of Hamburg, out of the total number of 249 armed conflicts that took place between 1945 and 2014, 176 were internal political conflicts.² The so-called ethnic renaissance of the early 1970s³ is responsible, on many occasions, for the transformation of internal political conflicts at the turn of the 21st century into ethnopolitical confrontations.⁴ …

THE WORLD faces a range of problems, among them new infectious diseases, growing poverty, environmental pollution, climate change, depletion of vital non-renewable energy resources, and dwindling reserves of drinking water. These problems affect everyone in the world and cause wide-scale concern, with civil society being one of the channels through which such concern is expressed.¹ It is increasingly often argued that such problems cannot be solved without a system of global governance that would be based on values shared by people of all cultures, political views, religious beliefs, and philosophical principles. Not accidentally, this is one of the issues on the agenda of the United Nations – the organization has a specialized body for this purpose, the Commission on Global Governance.²

What, however, would need to be done to make sure that global governance is a system that represents the interests of every individual and those of civil society as a whole? What role would global organizations and large supranational associations such as the European Union give civil society in their decision-making? What would be the mechanisms for public participation in global governance? How these and similar questions are answered is essential for comprehending processes of civilizational development, including the development of civil society. …

International Affairs: The Russian Foreign Ministry’s Chief Administration for Services to the Diplomatic Corps (GlavUpDK) has a rich history. How did it all start? What evolutionary path has GlavUpDK traversed in these nearly 100 years? What was it like getting through the collapse of the Soviet Union and the turmoil of the wild 1990s?

The history of the organization is part and parcel of the history of the country. It has been a long road from the Bureau for Services for Foreigners (Byurobin), which was set up in 1921, to the present-day enterprise that offers a whole range of services. …

(A Nornickel Initiative)

MUCH of what is said and written about international information security amounts to alarmist predictions that the use of high technology to destabilize the current world order will continue to grow in scale. With all respect for those who make such predictions, it has to be admitted that it’s too late to start getting anxious – what they are foretelling has already happened. Cybersecurity issues are dealt with on the front pages of newspapers and the homepages of websites, and are high on agendas for relations between countries. …

DESPITE their different geographical positions – one being a continental and the other an insular country – Russia and Japan are close neighbors. They are divided only by several kilometers of water, while bound together by an extensive network of ties and cooperation.

An agreement reached at a Russian-Japanese summit in Vladivostok. Russia, in September 2017 declares 2018 a Russia Year in Japan and a Japan Year in Russia. …

WHEN Australia’s Minister for External Affairs, HV “Doc” Evatt, and his Soviet counterpart, Vyacheslav Molotov, met to establish diplomatic relations in London on 10 October 1942, the course of the Second World War was by no means determined. At that time, we were allies against Hitler’s Germany.

From the moment Australia declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939 until Victory in Europe Day in May 1945, Australian seamen and aircrew fought in the European theatre – including the famous Polar Convoys that helped deliver essential war materiel to the Soviet Union. We continue to honour their sacrifice and the enormous price paid by the Soviet peoples in achieving ultimate victory over military aggression. …

ALL COUNTRIES in the world are special and unique. However, every state is unique in its own way. One of the most unique and interesting countries is Myanmar, or the Republic of the Union of Myanmar, prior to 1989 known as Burma.*

Aung San Suu Kyi, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 for her dedicated years-long struggle for democracy and human rights, is a highly popular international figure. She has been portrayed in films and several books have been written about her. The National League for Democracy, a party that she leads, won a convincing victory in parliamentary elections in November 2015. Aung San Suu Kyi currently holds the post of state counselor and foreign minister, being in effect the head of government. Her father, General Aung San, a national hero and architect of the country’s independence, initiated the establishment of diplomatic …

Armen Oganesyan, Editor-in-Chief of International Affairs

THANK YOU FOR RESPONDING to our invitation. Traditionally, our guests and participants are invited to say a few words of welcome. Mikhail Nikolayevich Yevdokimov, Director of the First CIS Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia, please begin. …

ON MAY 26, 1942, in London, Vyacheslav Molotov, People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the USSR, and Anthony Eden, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs of Great Britain, signed the Anglo-Soviet Treaty of Alliance in the War Against Hitlerite Germany and Its Associates in Europe and of Collaboration and Mutual Assistance thereafter for 20 years. This treaty was “designed to confirm the stipulations of the agreement between His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom and the Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics for joint action in the war against Germany signed at Moscow, July 12, 1941.” It was said in the new treaty that “the high contracting parties mutually undertake to afford one another military and other assistance and support of all kinds in war against Germany and all those States which are associated with her in acts of aggression in Europe… and undertake not to enter into any negotiations with the Hitlerite Government or any other government in Germany that does not clearly renounce all aggression intentions, and not to negotiate or conclude, except by mutual consent, any armistice or peace treaty with Germany.” The Treaty signed by the foreign ministers of both countries expanded the temporal limits of allied relations and created a potential legal basis of further cooperation: “The high contracting parties, having regard to the interests of security of each of them, agree to work together in close and friendly collaboration after re-establishment of peace… take into account the interests of the United Nations … and act in accordance with the two principles of not seeking territorial aggrandizement for themselves and of non-interference in the internal affairs of other States.”¹

Yuri Bulatov, Dean, School of International Relations, Professor, Department of World and Russian History, Moscow State Institute (University) of International Relations, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, Doctor of History; mo.mgimo.ru …