- In your works you have introduced the concept of plastic power. What does it mean? In the age of plastic power, does it still make any sense to differentiate between rich and poor countries?
 
 

- Social anthropology and neuroscience claim today that man has developed along his evolution line and managed to substitute and overcome the symbolic systems of instinct. Chaos theory and postmodern sociology have begun to set up a new view in the sciences that challenges the existing understanding of the world, its irreducibility to the initial conditions, the nonlinearity of the cause-effect relationship, the essential indeterminacy of our ability measurement, the incompleteness of any axiomatic system and the need for an understanding of the whole is not reducible to its constituent elements. The plastic power is the power of man himself, his ability to determine the future and shape the symbolic dimension and material world. The plastic power on the strategic level is used by those who have understood how to form their own universe of opportunities.

Therefore, the era of the plastic power is the era of strategic and geopolitical post-modernity where people and nations define their own worlds. Such post-modernity is the beginning of the world that is not Europe-centered, a post-Western-world. Postmodernism came to break the metaphysical unity of the world from a sociological and material criteria.

After the end of the bipolar system a plurality of linguistic identities was set free. Different political, social and economic conceptions of man challenged the uniform understanding of the strategic actions of international actors. The world was shaped Europe-centered in Westphalia (1648) and organized around the principles of rational-materialist ideas such as "violence, scarcity and utility," which gave metaphysics cohesion to the world until the end of the Cold War. That period is over.

The dichotomy between poverty and wealth is the old way of understanding the world. The modern experience of globalization was driven by force of the geo / political / economic expansion (blood, fire and trade) of the scattered remnants of the historical plurality under a single heading, I think.

The West dominated the world not only symbolically but also materially. The Western domination based of the material interdependence and vivid metaphors of the Western thought became global. The Western philosophical systems that prevailed in some way, morally legitimized some epistemological and ontological principle of violence. Such systems range from Machiavelli to Hobbes, and from the French materialists to Darwin and from Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt, all organizers Eurocentric concept of European thought.

The West was spreading his own version of modernity as a universal one using such living symbolic metaphors "leader, fatherland, charisma, political, republic, or reasons of state bureaucracy," as well as references to the material aspects of life such as “market, property, shortages or price”. Such metaphors monopolized our understanding of reality and thus put an end to any different thinking about the sociopolitical and economic dynamics on the global scale.

 

- If not the dichotomy "rich vs poor", which may replace the previous one ("West vs East")?  
 
 

- After the end of the bipolar conflict I think the real force behind the re-polarization of the world was the dichotomy “globalization – localization” rather than wealth and poverty. Today it is clear that this new dialectic of post-modernity is behind the strategic confrontation between the Europe-centered world and non Europe-centered world. The awakening of the non Europe-centered world is the unexpected result of the deployment of global political consciousness driven by the West. That symbolic deployment began in 1492, had its momentum in the French Revolution, spreading through Europe in the late eighteenth century, the rest of the West in the nineteenth and twentieth century from the Far East, first Japan, then India, and finally China. In this last stage, that impulse, added 2 / 5 of world population to political awareness, heralding the early "politicization" of the last hidden corners of the globe.

 

- What does it mean to be labeled "poor" today? Did it become a sort of identity for, e.g. Africa? How powerful is this symbol? Who has constructed it?
 
 

- Undoubtedly be poor today means not being able to participate in the Western modernity. Being an outsider of Europe-centered world means to be involved in functional retention and reproduction of that world, but without sharing its benefits. However strategic postmodernism signals the end of the “primus inter pares” and with it the collapse of corresponding geopolitical vision. This vision was built around the United States as distinctive geopolitical subject, by direct action or through the creation or transformation of international institutions for the realization of their interests.

 

- These and other problems will be debated in one of the sections of the Yaroslavl Global Policy Forum that you are attending this year. What are your expectations from these debates? What do you plan to say and what would you like to hear from other participants?

 

- I have the best expectations to the Global Policy Forum, I hope the exchange ideas with other young people from different parts of the world that would help us to forge a real generational change in the conduction of the global affairs.

I would like to present a southern perspective international agenda and take my chance to shape the non Europe-centered world. The international system is at a turning point. If the non-Western world becomes aware of its future, we together can generate a new framework for the development of the international relations. The globalization of knowledge and the advent of the global stage of capitalism can be focused on mastering the symbols that can accelerate the transfer of power to emerging countries. It is the door left open by the West to the non-Western world for redirecting the course of history. Hope to hear from other participants’ diagnoses, experiences and ideas to form networks and articulate processes of change.

 

By Yulia Netesova

 

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