Todd Bishop
This year’s G7 summit will be held in Biarritz, a coastal city on the southwestern tip of France from August 24th to 26th. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was excluded from the Crimea 2014 event, will arrive at the French President’s summer resort on Monday (August 18th), the medieval castle Fort de Brégançon. Meet with Mark Long.
The meeting will have two major themes: one is the long-unresolved military conflict in eastern Ukraine, and the other is how Europe and Russia will cooperate in maintaining the “Iranian nuclear agreement.”
These two major difficulties are not something that can be solved in a moment, but also require more countries to participate. Therefore, the “Mapu Club” at this time is more important for its political significance.
Mark Long has become the core of European-Russian relations
On the French side, Mark Long seems to be replacing German Chancellor Angela Merkel as an intermediary for political communication between Russia and the Western world. Although Merkel is fluent in Russian and has direct communication with Putin, his political strength is not as good as before. On the contrary, Mark Long has won the wish of the new EU leaders, and has gradually become the core of the EU. trend. It is no wonder that the new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has met or talked with Mark Long many times since he took office to help solve problems in eastern Ukraine.
In Russia, which has been sanctioned by the West, it is also unwelcome to the goodwill from Europe. Mark Long has promised to attend the Red Square parade on May 9th, 2020, which is extremely close to both sides. On the one hand, this balance balances Russia’s overall foreign policy toward China, and on the other hand, the general trend in a multi-polar world.
In order to show goodwill, the Russian side allowed the French banker Philippe Delpal, who had been imprisoned for half a year in Russia, to be released into a house arrest and was reported by the French media.
Hot and cold intertwined between Europe and Russia
In recent years, the Western countries and Russia seem to have fallen into a diplomatic stalemate: there are Ukrainian issues, and there are also disputes between Russia’s involvement in national elections and domestic politics. However, under the table, the economic and trade relations between the two EU core countries of France and Germany and Russia have increased. For example, France and Germany increased their bilateral trade with Russia by 11% and 8% respectively last year; Germany invested nearly 3.7 billion U.S. dollars last year, exceeding the level before the Crimean incident.
In addition to Germany’s Mercedez-Benz building a factory near Moscow in April this year, and Putin personally attended the opening ceremony, France’s Total has also invested in Russia’s natural gas development project in the Arctic Circle. . Of course, the more obvious European-Russian cooperation project is the “Nord Stream 2” natural gas pipeline that is threatened by the United States. This shows that the relationship between Europe and Russia is not as cold as the imagination.
What is reflected in the hot and cold entanglement of the EU-Russia relationship is actually the position and understanding of the country with a leading position in Europe in the future multi-polar world.
How to choose ideology under multipolarization
European countries dominated by liberal democracy are very different from Russia, which is close to authoritarianism, in political ideology and even economic policy. Therefore, there is a large number of liberalism in Putin’s G20 summit in Osaka before the end of June, and the subsequent remarks from European leaders.
However, this conflict of thinking does not allow major European countries to regard Russia as an ideological enemy of incompatibility. Instead, it deals with the relationship between the two sides in practice, and the combination of the two is not the same as the opposition.
There is no reason for this: if an ideology has confidence in itself and is not afraid to learn from failure and bring about its own change, if another ideology is not comparable to its laggard, it may be beneficial to its own opponent. Such a “other” does not have to be an enemy anyway, so it is not worth the hard power.
Due to the multi-polarization of hard power such as economy and military, the political ideology options of the future world will also exhibit the same multi-polarization. How to deal with the relationship with the other, but not to turn it into an enemy, will be extremely important. Markron, a new generation of EU leaders, began to want to do this, but the leaders of the big countries on the other side of the Atlantic seem to be turning back.
