Value conflict and ‘the Cold War of values’

“The foremost task of leading Western politicians is not to try to reshape other cultures in the image of the West.”– Samuel Huntington.

Europe must get used to this: In the future, stability in Eurasia can be guaranteed only through cooperation that accepts the integrity of different civilisations, cultures, and religions. This certainly does not mean abandoning principle, but rather building relationships based on cooperation and peaceful coexistence.
    An Arab politician recently warned German conference participants:
    It is time to talk to each other concretely. Above all, this applies to the issue of ‘values.’ Please do not underestimate our values, religion, and culture. We expect respect and appreciate your culture. This is the core of our relationship. Governments come and go. Culture, religion, and values remain. Without an understanding of them, there will be no viable, resilient partnership between us. I advise you not to forget: We also have other partners and live in a different world. This new world is open to us. We are no longer dependent on you in this world. Should we fail to agree on acceptable principles for a shared, respectful relationship with our religions, values, and cultures, then we will have no basis for relations and mutual trust.¹
    Even immediately after the end of the Cold War, the West made no secret of its intention to allow “external interventions” to enforce the “human dimension.” “Human dimension” is its conceptual unit for democracy, the rule of law, and human rights.
    The war of values is not defensive; it is an offensive one. The offensive lies in the self-empowerment to effect “regime change” and to install governments compatible with alliances. At its core, it is about a further breakdown of the territorial and geostrategic status quo beyond the geographical space opened up after 1990.
    Behind this lies the endeavour to expand the Western normative and institutional worldview into an internationally dominant one. Under the current international conditions of multipolarity, such an approach to the diversity of social, regulatory, and value systems promotes the “Cold War of values” into one of the most complex conflict areas in world politics. Its militarisation through wars and interventions for the purpose of regime change has turned it into a question of “war or peace.”
    As early as in the Charter of Paris² of November 1990, all Eastern CSCE states were obligated to “establish, consolidate, and strengthen democracy as the only form of government.”
    Political blackmail was also used to enforce this. “For example, as early as 1991,” Sigita Urdze, the scholar of EU policy, has written, “the EU enshrined a commitment to promoting democracy in the Maastricht Treaty as a basis for recognising the state independence of the Central Asian states.”³
    Hans-Dietrich Genscher wrote in his memoirs: “The Charter of Paris [created] a foundation for all the fundamental values and principles of a free social order.”⁴ It was also Genscher who, at the Moscow CSCE conference in September 1991, insisted that “external interventions” were permissible to enforce the human dimension.
    He notes in his memoirs: “At this Moscow conference, a few weeks after the Moscow coup in the summer of 1991, the Soviet Union [then under President Yeltsin] joined my initiative to enshrine, within the CSCE framework, the non-recognition of unconstitutional transfers of power and, furthermore, to decide that the demand for respect for human rights is not subject to the prohibition of interference in internal affairs.” (Genscher, p. 321).
    “The barbarians are descending upon us!” Siegmar Gabriel, then head of the Foreign Office, uttered this phrase, shameful for a foreign minister, at the 2019
Munich Security Conference. He continued: “In today’s new world, which is far more complex than the Cold War era, the issue is systemic competition between developed democracies and autocracies. […] It is once again about the old question of freedom and democracy in systemic competition with new autocratic forms of government.” (Emphasis A. S.) Gabriel invoked the “beginning of an Asian age” that might have engulfed even Europe in 600 years’ time, before apocalyptically quoting Benjamin Franklin: “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”⁵

‘War on Terror’

Against this backdrop, the “West,” in the context of the “War on Terror,” created, with the help of the policy concept of Responsibility to Protect, R2P, a framework under international law for its use, which made “democratic peace” and “democratic intervention” as a “human dimension” also areas of NATO intervention.⁶ These undermined key provisions of the Charter of the United Nations for guaranteeing international security and peace, including the fundamental principle of international law, i.e., the sovereign equality of states.
    What is completely rejected to this day is the principle of the Helsinki Final Act, according to which “by virtue of the principle of equality and self-determination of peoples… all peoples have the right at any time, in full freedom, when and how they wish, to determine their internal and external political status without external interference and to pursue their political, economic, social and cultural development according to their own wishes.”⁷
    Disguised as human rights, the Western desire for global value dominance was also incorporated into its transatlantic doctrine of the “rules-based international order.” This made it not only an integral part of respective national policies, but also of NATO: “We remain a bulwark of the rules-based international order” (emphasis A. S.), claims the “NATO 2022 Strategic Concept.” Furthermore, the NATO member states’ heads of state and government decided: “We will strengthen our ties with partners that share the Alliance’s values and interest in upholding the rules-based international order. We will enhance dialogue and cooperation to defend that order, uphold our values and protect the systems, standards and technologies on which they depend.”⁸
    NATO staked out a 360-degree area of operations for this purpose. Consequently, this is a global threat without there being any actual danger to security – neither to NATO nor to its member states. In other words, the entire trans–Atlantic alliance continues to wage a “Cold War of values.”
    What a historic threat to global peaceful coexistence in a multipolar world!

BRICS’ unequivocal warning and determination to resist and face international opposition

Globally – in 2021, this included approximately 3.2 billion people in the BRICS countries, i. e., 41 per cent of the world’s population, with their social values and norms, cultures, religions, etc. The BRICS countries were certainly aware of the values provocation by the West and NATO. They responded at the 2024 BRICS summit in Kazan, Russia, in a subtle but unambiguous manner: “They agreed to strengthen cooperation on issues of common interest both within the BRICS and in multilateral forums, including the United Nations General Assembly and the Human Rights Council, taking into account the need to promote, protect, and fulfil human rights in a non-selective, non-politicised, and constructive manner, and without any double standards.”⁹
    It confirms that the states of the Global South and Eurasia are not only rejecting the provocation of values by the West and NATO. The same applies to its dogmatisation as a global trans-Atlantic strategy within and through the “rules-based international order.”
    Their rejection is justified: Following the end of the East-West conflict and the Cold War in 1990, international disagreement over how to deal with differing value-based and systemic orientations has once again led to sharp divisions and a new systemic antagonisms. It gained relevance to security policy primarily through the question of the “other side’s” political intentions. This gives the demand to take into account the plurality of social, regulatory, and value systems in our world its direct external and internal relevance to peace policy. The manner and political intentions with which the differences in systems of governance are perceived are crucial in determining which international control mechanisms states adopt – hegemonic and confrontational, or co-existential, conflict-preventive, and peace-oriented.
    Particularly the West’s intention to expand its politically normative and institutional worldview into the internationally dominant one after the end of the Cold War transformed dealing with the diversity of social, regulatory, and value systems into one of the most complex areas of conflict in world politics. Its militarisation through wars and interventions aimed at regime change turns it into a question of “war or peace.”

Let us end the Cold War of values immediately

From all this, the following two demands arise:
    First: There is no objective reason for failing immediately to end the “war of values.” Neither the values nor the political identity and order of Western societies are threatened by the East or South. The diplomatic approach should be to assess realistically the significance and place of the value issue under contemporary multipolar and socio-culturally pluralistic conditions. Modalities should be developed for a peaceful approach to the value conflict that enable cooperative relations between states. The value issue must be removed from every military-political context, including NATO.
    Second: The principles of the Helsinki Final Act and the Charter of Paris must be upheld. Within the framework of the OSCE, its signatory states should reaffirm their commitment to upholding these principles and fundamental rules. These states have signed the Final Act, are familiar with its content, and agreed to its continued validity after the end of the Cold War as part of a European peace order. In reality, however, this order has been eroded by the new interstate conflicts following the end of the East-West conflict and the first Cold War. The Final Act should regain its validity as a normative framework.
    Peaceful coexistence remains the only realistic way out of the ruinous crisis pertaining to the relationship between the Europe of the EU and its Eurasian continental context extending into the Middle East.•

¹ Author’s archive. Quotation from 2024
²Charter of Paris for a New Europe. Declaration of the Paris CSCE Meeting of Heads of State and Government, Paris, 21 November 1990, in: Fastenrath, Ulrich (ed.). CSCE/OSCE. Documents of the Conference and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, Cologne 2008, Chapter A.2, p. 2
³ Urdze, Sigita. Die externe Demokratieförderung der EU in den zentralasiatischen Staaten. (The EU’s external democracy promotion in the Central Asian states), Nomos, 2010, p. 157
⁴ Genscher, Hans-Dietrich. Memoirs, Siedler Verlag, Berlin, 1995, p. 319
⁵ Speech by Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel at the Munich Security Conference; https://www.auswärtiges-amt.de/de/newsroom/rede-muenchner-sicherheitskonferenz
⁶ Proponents of the “responsibility to protect” concept assume that each state has a duty under international law to guarantee the well-being of the citizens under its jurisdiction by virtue of its personal or territorial sovereignty. If a state’s government is unable or unwilling to protect its citizens from serious human rights violations, the international community may intervene to protect the threatened population by virtue of a mandate issued by the UN Security Council. (https://www.bpb.de/themen/kriege-konflikte/dossier-kriege-konflikte/504329/schutzverantwortung-responsibility-to-protect/).
⁷Helsinki Final Act, Chapter VIII. Equality and Self-Determination of Peoples
⁸ NATO, Adopted by Heads of State and Government at the NATO Summit in Madrid, 29 June 2022, p. 1
⁹ Joint Statement of the BRICS Ministers for Foreign Affairs/International Relations, Item 49, 10 June 2024; https://www.mea.gov.in/bilateral-documents.htm?dtl/37860/joint+statement+of+the+brics+ministers+of+foreign

* Dr Dr h. c. Arne Clemens Seifert (born 1937 in Berlin), Ambassador (ret.), Senior Research Fellow, WeltTrends-Institute for International Politics, Potsdam. Studied at the Institute for International Relations, Moscow, specialising in Turkey, Iran, and Afghanistan, graduated in 1963. Received his doctorate at the Institut für Internationale Arbeiterbewegung (Institute for the International Workers’ Movement), Berlin, in 1977. Received an honorary doctorate from the Orient Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2017. Served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the GDR from 1964 to 1990: Arab States Division, working on the ground in Egypt and Jordan. Head of the sector for Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan; Research Associate to the Deputy Minister for Asia and Africa; Ambassador to Kuwait 1982–1987; Head of Department 1987–1990. After 1990: OSCE Mission to Tajikistan; Central Asia Advisor at the Center for OSCE Research (CORE), Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg, specialising in OSCE and Central Asia research – civilian conflict prevention, transformation, political Islam, secular-Islamic relations, and political processes. Recent publications include: Dialog und Transformation – 25 Jahre OSZE- und Zentralasienforschung, (Dialogue and Transformation – 25 Years of OSCE and Central Asia Research), Nomos; Islamischer Aufbruch in Zentralasien – Spezifika religiöser Radikalisierungsprävention, (Islamic Awakening in Central Asia – Specifics of Religious Radicalisation Prevention), OSCE Yearbook Vol. 24, 2018; Friedliche Koexistenz in unserer Zeit – Der neue Kalte Krieg und die Friedensfrage, (Peaceful Coexistence in Our Time – The New Cold War and the Question of Peace), WeltTrends 2021. “Regelbasierte internationale Ordnung” versus post-koloniale Emanzipation – Grenzen und Sackgassen eines globalen Hegemonieprojekts, (“Rules-based international order” versus post-colonial emancipation – limits and dead ends of a global hegemony project), World Trends 2022