“Multilateralism, now largely weakened, remains a sine qua non of commodity diplomacy”

Drom the drought that is raging from the Horn of Africa to Europe, to the dramatic consequences of the war in Ukraine, almost everything brings us back to raw materials. Raw materials which, however, had been largely erased from multilateral agendas. Believing in the virtues of happy globalization and in the myth of resources available at all times and in all circumstances, Europe in particular has long underestimated their political significance.

Faced with the Ukrainian tragedy, there is no longer any need to recall that extractive or agricultural resources can condition the development of an armed conflict by the export revenues they generate, by the strategic objective they represent , as well as by the various levers of negotiation and the retaliatory measures they offer, like Russian gas and Ukrainian wheat or, even more recently, Chinese sand whose exports to Taiwan have just ceased.

An element of world harmony

Admittedly, Europe has now turned its back on a candid vision of the markets and has embarked on a proactive strategy of securing its supplies of critical metals [cobalt, nickel, lithium…]. The reflex is salutary, but it is by no means sufficient given the scale of the issues. There is, moreover, a fundamental ambiguity in the very notion of “securing”. It enshrines the idea of ​​an inevitable and growing rivalry between nations for access to these strategic resources and therefore accepts the hypothesis that interstate conflicts may arise.

To avoid this, we need a diplomacy of raw materials and the strategic thinking likely to fuel it, with the ambition of responding to the major challenges of our world, whether it concerns global food security or the fight against global warming. Four prerequisites must then be met.

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It is important, first and foremost, to rebuild a doctrine in which raw materials can be perceived as a determining element of world harmony. Peace is, it is said, “an interval between two wars” and this is perhaps why the triggering factors of conflicts have been studied much more than those conditioning the understanding of nations. Raw materials have, in the same way, above all been apprehended with regard to the various antagonisms that they produce and not in their relation to peace. This paradigm must evolve to feed this new, ambitious and pragmatic diplomacy.

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