Speaking today at a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s (SCO) Heads of State Council, Russian President Vladimir Putin made the point that the SCO is now the largest regional cooperation organization in the world. Over half of the world’s population lives in SCO member states, accounting for about 25% of the global GDP—and those states “have a powerful intellectual and technological potential and a considerable part of the global natural resources.”
Putin welcomed both Iran’s “earliest possible accession” to the SCO in the documents to be signed today and Belarus’s beginning the accession process; and then he named those countries that are new dialogue partners, and those that have begun the process of obtaining that status. There are many more countries, he added, that seek membership in or association with the SCO. All are welcomed, he said, because the SCO is a “non-bloc association…. We are open to working with the whole world.”
He emphasized that in a very complicated international situation, the SCO is not “marking time,” but rather continuing to develop and build its role in addressing international and regional issues—maintaining peace and stability “throughout the vast Eurasian space.” And take note, he said, of the coming changes in global politics and the economy which “are about to undergo fundamental and irreversible changes.”
How? There are new “centers of power” emerging, and the interaction among them is not “based on some rules, which are being forced on them by external forces and which nobody has seen, but on the universally recognized principles of the rule of international law and the UN Charter, namely, equal and indivisible security and respect for each other’s sovereignty, national values and interests.”
