Editor's note: At the 1st plenary session of the 11th World Peace Forum held at Tsinghua University in Beijing, Dilma Vana Rousseff, current president of the New Development Bank and former Brazilian president, gave a keynote speech sharing her insights about global order and governance. The video clip is an excerpt from her full speech. The speech reflects the speaker's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.
President of the New Development Bank Dilma Vana Rousseff, who is also former president of Brazil, referred Western attempts of "decoupling" and "de-risking" as "political weapons to curtail the rise of new players in the international arena." In her vision, a disconnected world would be like a "return to the Iron Curtain." Here's the full transcript of the video clip.
The concepts of cooperation and consensus are opposed to the rhetoric of narratives that seek to impose a sectarian vision of civilization, development, human rights and democracy. Political models derived from the experience of a single country have been elevated to the condition of the only acceptable standard for the entire world. It's a standard whose adoption is mandatory, lest those values are imposed through traditional warfare, coups, or blockades, or sanctions. The rich diversity of human civilization is dismissed, and the different development paths and models pursued by different nations, from this point of view, are disregarded. And it is an attempt to impose a single path for development and a single vision of democracy in its new liberal version, which is at the root of the proliferation of fascist regimes.
Rather than mere objective phenomena that weaken the patterns of globalized economic and financial relations, notions, such as decoupling and de-risking, are indeed political weapons used to curtail the rise of new players in the international arena. The very dynamics of globalization, although currently weaker, has given rise to a deep interdependence among economies and regions of the world, an interconnection that has grown in tandem with the increase in international trade, the greater density of global value chains and multiplication of capital flows. Disconnecting the world has thus become unworkable, and any attempts to erect insurmountable barriers between nations or countries is nothing but an extraordinary return to the Iron Curtain.
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