Philosophical aspect of the UN

About a year ago, the IIA Russian Today established the Zinoviyev Club, named in honor of Alexander Zinoviyev, a Russian philosopher and sociologist who lived in forced emigration in Germany for 20 years, returning to Russia in 1999, where he read lectures at the Philosophy Department of MSU. The Zinoviyev Club became an expert research platform in which members of the club wanted to form a just image of Russia in the world in opposition to “the liberal and neoliberal pseudo-democratic propaganda.”

Today the world is following the 70th session of the UN General Assembly, and experts of the Zinoviyev Club contributed to a discussion about the prospects of the UN. Pavel Rodkin, a member of the Zinoviyev Club, recalled that the UN was created on the basis of the ideology of progress and humanism, which determined the development of industrial society in the second half of the 20th century. “The UN, while being a supranational and global institution, never fell under the suspicion which transnational corporations and western humanism projects are constantly under. These principles of the UN's activities are maintained in real international politics,” Rodkin said.

According to Rodkin, in his speech, Vladimir Putin appealed precisely to this value base. “We do not suffer from some kind of political idealism and are able to realize that the modern world order is not based on ethics, but rather on the metaphysics of power, absolute and global power. The problem lies in the fact that today the UN does not correspond to the change in the global agenda, not just technically but, above all, ideologically. Today there is not only the dismantling of boundaries and political regimes, but also the dismantling of the ideology of progress. And in this sense, the world order is changing fundamentally. In the context of these changes, the UN is an unnecessary ideological element, because for the new world counter hegemony, which is beginning to appear more and more clearly in the development of chaos in the modern world, for this hegemony there are alternative moral authorities and moral values, and the UN, in addition to political values, had a certain moral authority, today they are no longer needed. Today and in the future there will be attempts to dismantle and reform the UN,” Rodkin predicted.