Asia-Europe: human rights crisis (and freedom of trade)
The rare stand taken by the German ambassador Michael Clauss for the release of Msgr. Peter Shao Zhumin and Freedom of Commerce on the New Silk Road, under the shadow of the Chinese monopoly. The silence surrounding the fragmentation of the international legal system. Instead of democracies, there are autocratic regimes, violent nationalisms, oriental satrapies. And Trump sells arms to Saudi Arabia.
Milan (AsiaNews) - In recent days, the ambassador of the German Federal Republic in China published an unusual note of protest against the Chinese government on the official Embassy website regarding the harsh persecutions it has been implementing for some time against Bishop Msgr. Pietro Shao Zumin.
Ambassador Michael Clauss (see photo 2) explicitly called for the Bishop of Wenzhou to be released to the Catholic Church, and at the same time expressed strong fears of the legislative "turnaround" with which the totalitarian regime in Beijing intends to further repress religious liberty in China.
This news has unfortunately passed in relative silence in Europe and more generally in the West, while in reality it deserves far greater attention.
Ambassador Clauss's stance on human rights violations in China is in fact followed by his statements on the possibilities for concrete development of the pharaonic strategic investment program launched by the Chinese government, known as One Belt One Road (Obor, the New Silk Road), with which President Xi Jinping intends to de facto affirm a new Chinese geopolitical leadership.
The doubts and opportunities that arise from this strategic program are: on the one hand, the concrete opportunities for economic development and the distribution of prosperity among large groups of Asian, Middle Eastern, African and even European populations; On the other, the more than reasonable fear that this enormous investment plan has a purely cynical, legal and political profile, that is, absolutely unbalanced and disadvantageous for the European states invited into the partnership, as its related contractual and diplomatic protocols would put Beijing in a privileged position of holding gold-share decision-making weight on each program, thus finally endorsing a form of global protectionism and monopoly dangerously reminiscent of the logic of the power politics of the Western empires of the last century.
In particular, the European Union (EU) has founded all its legal treaties on the political basis of the principle of the widest protection of all human freedoms, the so-called four pillars of the free movement of persons and ideas, goods and services, goods and capital, according to the liberal logic of the democratic system in a free market.
But this international political approach unfortunately is denied by the trend of change in power structures on the planet, and the EU - which has always boasted of being a "civil power" that abstains from recourse to military, muscular or monopoly power in international relations - does not seem to favor systems of cooperation and peaceful development in the name of the primacy of citizens' rights.
Both cases of concern for the German ambassador, the persecution of the Bishop of Wenzhou and the project of the New Silk Road, are united by a red thread, which is the current crisis in the role of the rule of law and protection of civil liberty and democracy in international relations, and this is a point where the European chancellors in particular are absent, despite the best declarations of goodwill.
The risk is not to be underestimated, indeed, scholars and analysts are well aware of the huge chess game that is being played across the entire Asian continent at the level of international political relations in this millennium, with the fragmentation of the regulatory system of international law of a clearly Western footprint with which the UN since the end of World War II aspired to guarantee international peace and security, as stated in Art.1 of its Statute.
Globalization has allowed entire regions of Asia that were economically underdeveloped to recover lost time, and these emerging countries are no longer willing to follow the western model of liberal democracy and the free market. In the Middle East, the fundamentalist insurgent monarchies, emirates and republics are drawing great benefits from the failure of Arab Spring, imposing a whole range of models on the world far removed from democracy due to the enormous financial wealth they have accumulated. In China we have an autocratic veteran-marxist regime with a market economy that ignores civil liberties, as Lai Pan Chiu recently pointed out to AsiaNews, in India Hindu nationalist populism is testing the pluralistic religious and democratic model in which Mahatma Gandhi believed.
The dangerous illusion that Europe is suffering is belief that Asian countries will align themselves passively with the western idea of an international order, based on democracy and the rule of law. In fact, we are well aware that these very noble principles have often been used instrumentally, have even been trampled upon by the West itself for reasons of political interest, while the EU would have had the duty to take the lead in civil power for promotion and sharing of these principles. International level, respecting different historical identities.
The real risk faced by scholars is that the planet no longer recognizes itself in an international political system based on the cooperation and concertation of all countries through the UN, which is certainly lazy, but which on many occasions has prevented the degeneration of political confrontation into war.
The consequence could be, as the well-known political scientist Charles Kupchan, former US President Bill Clinton's advisor, states that the geopolitical future of Asia and the West is constituted by ideologically and politically autarchic "forts", which do not share a common value platform on freedom, human rights and democracy, but are in competition if not in conflict with each other.
If Europe intends to propose itself to Asia as an authoritative interlocutor for peaceful and shared growth it must necessarily reconstruct its political unity by implementing democratic growth policies that focus on an ever-wider middle class band instead of allowing the interests of small oligarchic power groups that are willing to deal with Oriental satrapies. Contractual agreements for massive military supplies between President Donald Trump and Saudi Arabia's Salman king (photo 3) are an eloquent example of such dangerous choices.
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17/12/2004
