Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland proposed a few days ago in Washington to review Western economic and political relations with the rest of the world in order to take into account the growing hostility of authoritarian regimes, mainly Russia and China.
The heart of his proposal revolves around the creation of a bloc of democracies that would aim to tighten their ties and free themselves from the supply chains of authoritarian regimes. Freeland takes up here the concept of ” friendshoring advanced last summer by US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. She described the establishment of fortified and environmentally friendly supply chains that rely on allies who share the same values.
Freeland is convinced that this new reformatting would make it possible to break the influence of authoritarian regimes, to better protect Western workers against the effects of “unfair” competition from these regimes, to accelerate the green transition and to force certain Western countries to respect trade rules.
The political and economic decoupling with the rest of the world is not without raising some pitfalls that Freeland is trying hard to overcome. If the West is erecting new walls, how do you interact with those who, as she puts it, “nest between the two camps”? The answer would be simple: “our alliance of democracies must be open” to the democracies of the five continents which “really share our values”.
Just how many democracies are there in this bloc and what to do with Western illiberal regimes like Turkey, Hungary, Brazil, etc. ? No response from the Deputy Prime Minister, but for the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund Olivier Blanchard, the risk that this strategy of ” friendshoring » decreases international trade and that poor countries, democratic or not, pay the price is great.
Towards a renunciation of multilateralism?
With the West snug in its new tower, the countries of the South left between two waters until they choose their side, Freeland tackles future relations with dictatorships. A new approach is needed, she says. “We must stop thinking that their political systems will gradually mold themselves to ours in peace and enthusiasm as we grow collectively, and understand that authoritarian regimes are fundamentally hostile to us. At most, it will be necessary to collaborate on common objectives such as climate change, pandemics, disarmament.
It’s true, we have to be careful, but there are in the Freeland proposal the premises of a renunciation of multilateralism in contradiction with historical experience. The victory of the West over the Soviet bloc was made possible by the multiplication of economic, military and diplomatic links and agreements with regimes that were said to be irremovable, and not by excluding them from the international system.
Moreover, if Russia is a weak power that possesses nuclear weapons, China is in a category of its own. Its economic and political influence is not on the decline and is even set to grow. Finally, the emerging powers, which have refrained from condemning the invasion of Ukraine or from imposing sanctions on Russia, have their own interests and are determined to take their place in the heart of the New World without leaving the North sole authorship of its creation.
The Ukrainian crisis runs through the entire argument of the Deputy Prime Minister. This clouds his judgment of who was responsible for the splintering of the order that emerged after the fall of the wall in 1989. Freeland believes that the invasion of Ukraine spells the end of a 33-year period that would have been “sunny years in the history of mankind. ” Really ? The new world order began to crumble during the war in Iraq in 2003, and if Westerners were swimming “in carelessness”, this is certainly not the experience of those who, from the Balkans to the Afghanistan, Chechnya, Libya and other places have been bombed by great powers, whoever they are.
Idealized but dangerous world
Freeland’s proposal must be debated, because it has the merit of indicating a path and confronting ideas about the world to come. It will encounter opposition, even in the West. In their latest issue, the specialist journals Foreign Affairs and The National Interest publish expert analyzes on the reconfiguration of international relations. Several call for giving up on changing the behavior of States and not erecting new walls. The current Western approach, writes one of the experts, “no longer allows us to deal with the many forces that govern international power relations”.
“A future world order will have to take into account non-Western powers and tolerate a greater diversity of practices and national institutional organizations. Western policy preferences will carry less weight, the quest for harmonization between economies that has defined the age of hyper-globalization will be lessened, and each country will need to be given more leeway in managing its economy. of its society and its political system. In short, we must prefer order to the crusade.
In his fight against dictatorships, Freeland traces the contours of an idealized but dangerous world. Its strength rests on the solidarity of democracies, its weakness on the temptation of exclusion. In this regard, it harbors a ferment of conflict. In his latest book (Diplomatic stories, Grasset, 2022), Gérard Araud, former French ambassador, sums up the trap into which idealists fall. “Passions are undoubtedly the worst enemy of diplomats,” he wrote. They invoke the absolute where everything is relative; they substitute morality for analysis and forget interests for the beautiful gesture. They are found behind every disaster. »