Programme Director of the Valdai Discussion Club; Professor, MGIMO University; Professor, Russian Academy of Sciences
The dynamics of world politics in the 21st century have shifted more and more from the traditional balance of power to the normative and value conditionality of foreign policy actions. Therefore, moral attitudes have begun to play an increasing and sometimes prevailing role over law in world diplomacy and foreign policy struggles. Of particular importance is the moral-value factor for the perception by society of foreign policy in various countries. Therefore, the problems of moral relativism have come to the fore, amid value revisionism and the normative conditionality of foreign policy. They also affect divergent versions of historical memory among different states and societies. Various moral and ethical approaches to world politics lead to the fact that actors increasingly speak languages which different semantics, even when everyone speaks the same professional English. The reason lies in the various value orientations and public expectations of foreign policy in various societies. Therefore, mutual semantic misunderstanding is now becoming a key problem in international relations. The dialectic of morality and law is clearly manifest in global efforts to combat climate change and, more broadly, in all environmental issues. In actively developing global environmental ethics, new environmental values pose a serious challenge to the established principles of economic and social governance. In this regard, climate issues may be at the forefront of discussions about the rules for the functioning of world politics, the parameters of the future world order, as well as moral and ethical acceptability.