By Russia’s foreign minister Sergey V. Lavrov
The world is changing, the share of the United States and Europe in the global GDP is shrinking, there have emerged new centers of economic growth and financial power, whose political influence has been soaring accordingly.
As concerns economy, there seems to be growing awareness of that. The G20 group has been created. In 2010 the G20 made a decision to reform the International Monetary Fund to redistribute quotas from the Western countries so that new, growing economies can receive a little bit more quotas.
Then the crisis began to ease somewhat and the United States and the European Union these days are in no mood to stand by those arrangements. Now they are determined to retain positions within the IMF that are by no means proportionate to their real economic potential in the world. A really tough struggle is underway for keeping unchanged the state of affairs in which the Western civilization determines the shape of the world order.
This is a faulty policy with no chances to succeed, objective processes are developing in opposite direction. The world is getting really polycentric. China, India, Brazil, the ASEAN countries, Latin America and, lastly, Africa – a continent with the richest natural resources – all begin to realize their real significance for world politics.
There will be no stopping this trend. True, it can be resisted, and such attempts are being made, but it is really hard to go against the stream.
This is the cause of many crises.