US, EU's Century of Supremacy Over: MEP

The third international conference on "The Future of Peace and Human Rights in West Asia" was hosted online by FODASUN (Foundation of Dialogue and Solidarity of United Nations Public Relations) on Thursday, Dec. 9, on the occasion of World Human Rights Day. The conference was attended by more than twenty speakers from 13 countries.

The FODASUN is a non-governmental organization dedicated to regional and international peace, dialogue, solidarity and the defense of human rights. The organization held the annual conference "The Future of Peace and Human Rights in West Asia" with the aim of regional synergy and integration, strengthening the culture of peace and dialogue, and providing solutions to address the challenges in the West Asian region.

Clare Daly, a member of the European Parliament, gave an address at the 3rd international conference of FODASUN on peace issues in West Asia, saying: “It is 2021 and the cause of promoting peace has never been more important. In my lifetime we have seen the end of one Cold War - which everyone agreed was a period of collective insanity in international affairs - and, recently, the attempt by some to start a new one.”

“In the intervening period - the 25 years or so of US hegemony - our world never knew peace. The United States and its allies used the reprieve from conflict between two superpowers to embark on a series of military adventures, devastating countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, and making the world less safe,” said Daly, who is also a member of the Committee on Civil Liberties and Justice in the European Parliament.

“Meanwhile, the collapse of the Soviet system saw a rupture in social peace, as the population of people living under capitalism nearly doubled. Twenty years ago, with its official enemy gone and nothing to justify its existence, the industrial war machine in NATO countries invented an enemy to do battle against: the so-called War on Terror was an invented conflict,” she added.

“I sit on the Security and Defence Committee in the European Parliament, and I am privy to the daily discussions taking place there, and the attitudes and activities of elected representatives and the European security establishment. Based on that, in fact, the opposite is true: the world seems to me to be barrelling towards conflict, presenting extreme challenges for the international movement for peace and cooperation. And at the present moment - a crucial moment, when international cooperation is needed more than ever - a majority of mainstream politicians in Europe are acting dangerously and irrationally,” she asserted, adding: “The world that we’re in now is much more dangerously unstable and unpredictable. There are not just two superpowers now in play. The United States is the world’s preeminent military power of course, but it has been obvious for some time that it has overextended itself and is in decline. Meanwhile Chinese economic and strategic power is expected to rise for the foreseeable future - a fact that is simply unbearable for establishments in the old colonial countries.”

” Leaders want us to believe that the present conflict is ideological - a battle, we’re told, between “democracy” and “authoritarianism” - like a reheated battle between capitalism and communism. But, more like the period of High Imperialism, the defining feature of the present period is inter capitalist competition between the powers. And the policy jargon of the day reflects this, with terms like ‘strategic rivalry’ and ‘great power competition,’” said MEP Daly.

“But this is not the only difference from the Cold War period. During the last 40 years, the processes of neoliberal capitalism and globalization have ensured that the world we inhabit is more interconnected and interdependent than ever before.”

“We need to face facts. The century of American and European supremacy is over. This is not a time to be burning bridges or to be building empires. Getting through the next few centuries as a global civilization is going to require cooperation, not competition, and the work needed to build that must be done now, not later,” said the member of the European Parliament at the end of her speech, adding that the world politics need to be reconfigured towards new structures of global peace.

“In the coming years, we must see a reconfiguration of world politics, away from the old colonial habits, and towards new structures of international peace and prosperity. In that new environment, Europe is going to either extract itself from declining US influence and join the international community, to be part of a peaceful, cooperative future, or it will guarantee its own irrelevance and stagnation in an increasingly insecure world. So for me, it is time for Europe to grow up, put aside our delusions of superiority, and start working with each other for survival.”