Former Executive Director of the UN Office on Drug Control and Crime Prevention (UNODC), Pino Arlacchi, a former European Parliament deputy and Schiller Institute friend, gave an online interview to OttolinaTV, on the sidelines of the XVI Eurasian Forum in Samarkand Nov. 3-5. The Eurasian Forum has traditionally taken place in Verona, Italy, where its organizer, the Conoscere Eurasia, association is based. Due to the complication produced by the Ukraine war, the last two sessions were held abroad: last year in Baku, Azerbaijan and this year in Samarkand, co-sponsored by the Uzbekistan government.
In the interview, Arlacchi elaborated, among other things, on the collapsing Western paradigm, on the ill-known features of China’s foreign policy, and also on the suicidal course of the European Union and its built-in failures.
The current unipolar world order is based on America’s power, which has two legs: military and finance, Arlacchi explained. The military has miserably failed and nobody fears it any more. The other leg, financial power, is the U.S.’s main resource. It controls financial markets, but the world is large and there is already an economic power based not on finance but on the real economy, and which is stronger than the United States in purchasing power—China. China’s model is that the state directs the markets and the economy, establishes the direction of the economy, makes investments that single firms are unable to make and uses people’s savings to develop the economy. This system is growing stronger and stronger from an economic standpoint.
Facing this reality, the unipolar system cannot last. There is a limit to the amount of dollars that can be printed, and it is only a question of time before the dollar begins to crack.
“The Chinese strategy is not to replace the dollar with the renminbi. They have said this in a hundred ways. If they had wanted to, they would have done it already. It’s enough to have their exports be paid for in renminbi, and that’s done. They have no intention to do it, because to get entangled in the current Wall Street-dominated financial system means to self-destruct. They prefer a multi-voice system; their central bank made a proposal a while ago, for a basket of five currencies which includes the dollar and the renminbi, the latter, however, not in a dominant position.
Arlacchi recalled that that had already occurred in history. Indeed, “this is the fifth substitution at the top in the West.” He quoted historian Fernand Braudel saying when finance dominates, it is a sign that autumn has come, and he gives the historical examples of the Netherlands and England, which grew as manufacturing/industrial economies and, as they turned into financial powers, they started to decline. The U.S. had followed the same trajectory. Parenthetically, he said that it was Italy that inaugurated this cycle: Italian cities in the 15th century were economic powers which, like Medici Florence and Genoa, had become financial powers.
“But since this cycle has a space dimension,” Arlacchi observed, “China’s rise must not necessarily follow the American model. In a certain sense, they are exactly the opposite. It is not at all certain that we will have a China-led world. Much more likely—it is a fact—we will have a multipolar world in which China is one of the great players, in a world which has become more just and democratic.”
