«Trialogue of Dialogues» at SPIEF-2019

6 June 2019

On June 6th MGIMO started its work at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. MGIMO stand is in Pavilion G (near Conference Hall G5) in partnership with Corteva™ Agriscience.

The first session «Trialogue of Dialogues: St. Petersburg, Sochi, Trianon» was devoted to such mechanisms of bilateral cooperation between Russian and the West as German-Russian Petersburg Dialogue, French-Russian Trianon Dialogues and Austrian-Russian Sochi Dialogue.

The work of the fora was described by their co-chairs - Chairman of PAO Gazprom Board of Directors V.Zubkov, Executive Director of Petersburg Dialogue forum M.Hoffman, MGIMO Rector A.Torkunov, Ambassador P.Morel, Aide to the Russian President A.Fursenko, Honorary President of the Austrian Economic Chamber, President of Eurochambres, the Association of European Chambers of Commerce and Industry, K.Leitl. The meeting was moderated by Deloitte CIS Partner Yekaterina Trofimova.

V. Zubkov noted that German-Russian Petersburg Dialogues continued its work even at the most difficult times. It arouses vivid public interest in both countries. On July 18th all the working groups of the forum will gather in Bonn, with each country being represented by more than 150 people. «The very format of the dialogue promotes informal, human interaction», stressed M.Hoffman.

«The primary reason for our dialogues is to solve issues in human communication. In the Trianon Dialogue we started by creating at first a powerful Internet-portal for interaction between the citizens of our countries. It is in demand, we are constantly working on it», noted Anatoly Torkunov. As for the coordination council, the MGIMO Rector said that each member of the council in the Trianon Dialogues represents a certain area being an initiator of projects: «For example, Patrick Pouyanné, CEO, Chairman of the Total Board of Directors, supported the meeting of French and Russian young leaders». P. Morel reminded those present that the forum today celebrates an anniversary: roughly a year ago, at the SPIEF 2018, a meeting of the Coordination Council and the meeting of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron took place.

The co-president of the Sochi Dialogue A.Fursenko stressed that the humanitarian relations between the countries not only follow the development of economic and political agenda, but they determine the bilateral ties in many ways.

The discussion on the use of public diplomacy continued during the press-conference «MGIMO’s Beyond Diplomacy. Informal Dialogues and Interdisciplinary Skills». MGIMO Rector Anatoly Torkunov told about the new MA interdisciplinary programmes with Microsoft, ADV and NVIDIA, MIPT, Karkas-Invest and MISiS , on sports diplomacy, on global agricultural markets. Ambassador Morel and I.Yurgens, member of the Coordination council of the forum, President of the All-Russia Union of Insurers spoke about the Trianon Dialogue and other public diplomacy platforms of the forum.