In his recent speech on the need to reform the United Nations Security Council, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan repeated what he has said before, but this time he emphasized some new aspects. «The world is more than five countries,» the Turkish leader said, referring to the five permanent veto-wielding members of the Security Council: the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, and China. He noted that under the current system, «the Islamic world does not have enough of a voice, and the interests of African, Latin American, and South Asian countries are ignored.
This has been said before, but this time he also drew attention to another aspect of the existing system. «The fate of humanity cannot be left to the mercy of a handful of countries that won the Second World War,» the Turkish president said.
And this is a very interesting statement. But to understand why, we need to rewind the tape of history a bit. In Russia and in the part of the post-Soviet space under its influence, which it calls the «Russian world,» the war Erdogan is talking about is still perceived not as the Second World War, but as the Great Patriotic War, mainly as a confrontation between the USSR and Nazi Germany. While it is not denied that the United Kingdom and the United States also fought against this «German fascism,» it is not given much importance because it happened somewhere on the periphery and «we won the war». But what was the war fought for? If it was the Patriotic War, then of course it was fought for the Fatherland, which was being attacked by the «German fascists». At the same time, while Stalin spoke of their goal of splitting the USSR (which the leaders of three of its republics successfully did half a century later at the Belovezhskaya Pushcha), Putin has now adopted the late postwar propaganda narrative according to which the goal of the «German fascists» was the «destruction of the Slavs.
Meanwhile, the Second World War, which is considered as such by the rest of the world, started 2 years before the beginning of the «Great Patriotic War». It began with the joint partition of Poland by the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany on the basis of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, followed by the declaration of war on Germany by France, the United Kingdom and some of its former colonies (New Zealand, Canada, South Africa).
At that time, the leaders of the Soviet Union apparently did not believe that Hitler intended to divide and destroy them, as they had watched for two years as the liberal Western countries fought against him alone, when it would have been reasonable for them to join the war on their side. Incidentally, the leaders of Nazi Germany also claimed that their war against the USSR, declared two years later, was not against «the peoples of Russia,» but against the internationally minded Bolsheviks who did not recognize their borders, even though Germany had unsuccessfully tried to negotiate with the USSR as a «nation-state,» recognizing its borders and even agreeing to expand them.
In any case, it is obvious that two tyrants — Hitler and Stalin — had nothing in common. But here we come to the aspect of this story that is directly related to Erdogan’s words.
The fact is that the leadership of Nazi Germany, while justifying the start of the war against the Soviet Union, mentioned not only the plans of the Soviet leadership to invade Europe, but also its behind-the-scenes negotiations with England. Whether this was true or Hitler’s paranoia is still unclear. But the fact remains that despite the attempts to make a deal with Germany that led to the outbreak of World War II, the Soviet Union ended up on the same side of the war as England and the United States.
This is an interesting point because the war was fought against both world communism and world capitalism, which, despite their deadly contradictions, united against a common enemy. It was not only Germany that participated in this war, but a whole bloc — the so-called Axis Powers, which initially included Berlin, Rome and Tokyo. And by the way, we put the term «German Fascists» in quotes on purpose because, strictly speaking, the Fascists were the Italians led by the founder of Fascism, Benito Mussolini, while the Germans were the National Socialists or Nazis.
Thus, in various years of this war, various nations, not only in Europe (several dozen different national divisions fought in the Wehrmacht and the SS), but all over the world, including the Arab world, India, and Iran, either joined or sympathized with this bloc. Their leading national political forces had different ideologies and approaches, but they shared the desire to resist both the export of communism and Anglo-Saxon hegemony.
These forces, which suffered defeat in the Second World War, which was jointly won by Western capitalists and Eastern communists, are the ones Erdogan is referring to when he says that the winners of the Second World War should no longer rule the world. He is obviously speaking on behalf of his own country and a much wider range of countries, including the Islamic world. For example, despite all the attempts to involve Turkey in this war, it stayed out of the Second World War, considering the outcome of its participation in the First World War. If we talk about the Islamic world as a whole, it was the arena of the struggle between the two allied powers during the Second World War and was divided between the communist and capitalist systems after the war.
Today, this agenda is no longer relevant for the Islamic world or for the world as a whole. In fact, it ceased to be relevant after the collapse of the socialist bloc. But then another illusion emerged — the establishment of a global, American-centered world order. But while it seemed to be emerging in the 1990s, it has become clear in this century that it is being steadily dismantled, like a deflating balloon.
The emerging reality today has nothing to do with the systems and ideologies that clashed in the first half of the last century and then confronted each other in the second. For example, what does today’s Putin’s Russia have to do with the USSR that participated in that war? The only thing they have in common is the commitment of the Chekists (members of the security services) to Stalin’s repressive methods against enemies of their power, who are declared «enemies of the people». In all other respects, one built industrial communism while the other built resource-based exploitative capitalism. Moreover, regardless of what Putin says about the USSR being «historical Russia,» in reality its ideology was proletarian internationalism under red flags with sickle and hammer, while under today’s Russian flags people fought in the ranks of the German army. From this point of view, China today has much more in common with the USSR than it does with Russia today, since it remains an officially communist state. So perhaps it would have been more logical for China to become a world leader alongside the West? In principle, judging by Putin’s actual policies, it is not impossible that this is what he believes. But in words, he is demanding a special place for Russia in the world order. And other players — India, Latin American countries, and the Islamic world itself — are no longer bound to the ideological picture of almost a century ago.
Thus, the realities of the world order that emerged from the friendship and enmity of Western capitalists and Eastern communists do not correspond to today’s realities. The world today goes beyond these two, and beyond the five mentioned by the Turkish president. And either this will be confirmed by expanding the composition of the UN Security Council, which would create a chance to establish a truly balanced world order, or this organization will increasingly turn into a ceremonial one, while the real forces of world politics will pursue their goals outside its scope.