On January 22 at 10:00 a.m., the Valdai Discussion Club held an expert discussion, titled “Social Goods as a Global Commons: Is There a New Challenge to Sovereignty?” together with the presentation of the report “The Social Global Commons: Is Global Inequality Solvable?”
One of the trends in modern global politics is a shift in focus from straight-forward geopolitics and the balance of power between countries to environmental, resource, demographic, and social issues. Over the past decade, the term “global problems” has been transformed into the concept of “Global Commons” and has been the focus of UN attention. Thus, the idea of Global Commons and equal access to it has begun to take shape as a new value in world politics, which could become a challenge to sovereignty.
The authors of the report call on the leading states of the world to combine their efforts to reduce the negative consequences of inequality in different areas: the gap between North and South, the “old” financial centres of the West and the new manufacturing economies of Eurasia and Latin America; restrictions on access to resources, innovations, technologies and knowledge, to the world labour market.
A separate topic is global migration. Indeed, if social goods are perceived as a global public domain, then the right of equal access to them should not be geographically limited. Migration begins to be perceived not as a challenge to the security and identity of the state which receives migrants, but as an essential tool in promoting these new, globalist values.
Is it possible to find a solution to the migration problem? Will the erosion of sovereignty continue? Is there the opposite trend? What can be the solution to the problem of inequality in the world? Without its effective solution, will the talk about “Global Commons” remain a utopia? Participants in the expert discussion answered these and other questions.
Speakers:
Wellington Pereira Carneiro, Senior Legal Advisor, UNHCR Office in Russia
Maria Apanovich, Associate Professor, Department of Demographic and Migration Policy, MGIMO University
Anatol Lieven, Professor at Georgetown University in Qatar (via video link)
Vasily Koltashov, Head of New Society Institute
Moderator:
Working languages: Russian, English