China and Russia declare ‘new era’ of multipolarity, challenging US interventionism

After meeting in Beijing, China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin released a joint statement clarifying the ideological divisions of the new cold war: Eurasian calls for multipolarity, cooperation, sovereignty, and “redistribution of power in the world” against US unipolar hegemony and interventionism.

 

by Benjamin Norton

 

Part 3 - China and Russia propose multipolarity and ‘well-being for all’ instead of US unilateralism and interventionism

 

In an unambiguous reference to the foreign policy of the United States, the Chinese-Russian joint statement declared that Washington’s policies of unilateralism and interference only represent a “minority” and must end:

                         Some actors representing but the minority on the international scale continue to advocate unilateral approaches to addressing international issues and resort to force; they interfere in the internal affairs of other states, infringing their legitimate rights and interests, and incite contradictions, differences and confrontation, thus hampering the development and progress of mankind, against the opposition from the international community.

Beijing and Moscow juxtaposed these interventionist practices of US imperialism with a proposal of multipolarity and “well-being for all”:

                         [China and Russia] call on all States to pursue well-being for all and, with these ends, to build dialogue and mutual trust, strengthen mutual understanding, champion such universal human values as peace, development, equality, justice, democracy and freedom, respect the rights of peoples to independently determine the development paths of their countries and the sovereignty and the security and development interests of States, to protect the United Nations-driven international architecture and the international law-based world order, seek genuine multipolarity with the United Nations and its Security Council playing a central and coordinating role, promote more democratic international relations, and ensure peace, stability and sustainable development across the world.

The declaration’s use of the phrase “international law-based world order” was important, because it was a rejection of the vague concept of the so-called “rules-based international order” that the US government has tried to impose on the world.

China’s and Russia’s ambassadors to the United States published a joint article in November 2021 that emphasized a similar point, writing:

                         There is only one international system in the world, i.e. the international system with the United Nations at its core. There is only one international order, i.e. the one underpinned by international law. And there is only one set of rules, i.e. the basic norms governing international relations based on the purposes and principles of the UN Charter. Flaunting the “rules-based international order” without referencing the UN and international law and attempting to replace international rules with the dictums of certain blocs falls into the category of revisionism and is obviously anti-democratic.

The February Chinese-Russian statement echoed much of what the ambassadors wrote in November, while further fleshing out the Eurasian perspective.

Both declarations strongly defended democracy, but in a more comprehensive, expanded definition of the term that reflects real people’s democracy, not just a superficial system in which “people are only awakened when casting their votes and sent back to hibernation when the voting is over.”

In a strident rejection of the “liberal interventionist” ideology of the US government, the Chinese-Russian statements condemned the cynical “abuse of democratic values and interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states under the pretext of protecting democracy and human rights.”

Source, links:

https://multipolarista.com/2022/02/07/china-russia-multipolar-historic-meeting/

 

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