The Caucasus crisis and the world financial and economic crisis both came 20 years after the fall of the Berlin wall and the demise of the Soviet Union, and set the limits of the possible for the inertial policy pursued all these years, particularly along the lines of the previous political and psychological assumption behind the “containment” of Russia.
In so doing, some of our Western partners acted in the spirit of the notorious triumphalism based on the thesis of “cold war victory” and the possibility of a Western-style “world revolution”. It was because of this inertia that one could not talk about a conclusive end to the cold war; for many, it continued at world level, now as a virtual project of certain forces that pronounced the “end of history” and a “unipolar world”, and attempted to transfer all this into the sphere of fully concrete practical politics.
As for the new, democratic Russia, it simply withdrew from the cold war, renouncing the ideology that underlay the Soviet participation in it. That was the choice of the Russian people and the peoples of the other ex-Soviet republics.
If there was a “victory”, then the states and political forces that drew the right conclusions from what happened can be considered top winners. And here, I boldly assert, Russia turned out to be among the front-runners. It was easier for us to draw these conclusions; our partners acting in the spirit of “tough pragmatism” helped us shed illusions. And then, in purely objective terms, , taking into account the conditions of the 1990s, it was hard for us not to take a stand as a realistic, commonsensical nation.
On the other hand, it took the West effort to foresee the course of events and articulate a realistic, forward-looking policy in international affairs. Glimmers of a sober approach could be seen: one has only to refer here to Henry Kissinger's 1994 book “Diplomacy”, where he foresaw the emergence of a multipolar world, with a role for the United States as the “first among equals”. But a euphoria that had nothing to do with serious analysis, let alone forecasts, engulfed real politics at mass level, presupposing neither an individual interpretation of what is happening nor individual creativity. In international affairs, a purely consumerist approach prevailed.
The new Russia could not become a part of the Western world order, since the burden of proof regarding its universality lay with the West. Yet the West, represented primarily by the US, drew conclusions that turned out to be wrong. The Western world order was not created in the 1990s. Essentially, especially at economy and finance level, it already existed during the cold war, and after the Soviet collapse the question arose whether it could be universal. But this question wasn't given much thought. Meanwhile, the world entered a period of transition - from bipolar, where all major decisions were made in Washington and Moscow, to something freer, fairer and more democratic, presupposing a significantly broader consensus. This was fully in line with the globalisation tendencies, resulting in the appearance of new centres of global economic growth and political clout.
Now, to use the terminology of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, we are threatened with a stage of “deglobalisation”. A similar process was under way in the period after the Great Depression, when the tendencies towards autarchy prevailed and an exit was searched according to the principle “everyone for himself”, largely on the lines of the militarisation of the economy, which gave the push towards a new war. Unfortunately, wars did not play a role in the evolution of the Western democracy.
Arnold Toynbee noted another historical regularity: militarism served as a vehicle for the self-destruction of empires. It has to be stated that it was the militarisation of foreign policy that largely predetermined the choice of the cold war, with its irrational waste of all kinds of resources.
A feature of World War II and the cold war was that the struggle for survival initially, and then, the ideological confrontation ensured a high degree of motivation at state and individual level, which was a factor in the development of scientific and technological progress on both sides of the “barricades”. Let us hope that humanity will at last put an end to this and find other sources of technological development.
So far, it does not appear to be possible to guess in advance the concrete directions in which a new technological base for the global economy will proceed. But the motivation for a new technological breakthrough could be provided by the imperatives of sustainable development and addressing a broad spectrum of problems, particularly energy security and climate change, on which the survival of all humanity depends.
Now facing the crisis of global governance, it is difficult to escape the conclusion about its complex, systemic nature. I would not agree with the assertion that structured international relations existed in the last 20 years. It was rather a drift of what had been and what ultimately proved its inadequacy, faced with the new realities. Therefore, speculations about preserving the status quo appear to be pointless and, essentially, reactionary conservative.
It is evident that all elements of global governance are interlinked. There can be no stable world economic system if international security is unstable. Simply, the crisis manifested itself at the beginning at superstructure level and only now, having accumulated a critical mass, has descended into the financial and economic base.
British correspondents at the International Herald Tribune, in a piece on March 30, 2009, cited testimonies of London City experts who consider that the start of the process of loss of control over the international financial architecture, created at Bretton Woods, was linked with the breakup of the Soviet Union and the American triumphalism that followed it.
It is hard to argue with the opinion of a whole array of historians that the West's adoption of a socially oriented model of economic development, with reliance on the middle class, was the forced product of the cold war to a significant extent, when the ruling Western European and US elites reacted to the “challenge of the Soviet Union” along the lines of the “socialisation” of the economy. Probably only in way could the European society create a sustainable economic development model, realising at long last the French Revolution's promise of a more equitable social arrangement. The attempts at renunciation the socially oriented economic model led to “the crisis of a system that has drifted away from its most fundamental values”, to use Nicolas Sarkozy's words, including a sense of morality.
Presently at issue is not preserving dominance, which is impossible in the presence of a strong influence of cultural and civilisational diversity on the destinies of the world, but reinforcing the claim of the European civilisation to a place on the team of leaders at this new turn in the development of the world. To this end, the unity of the European civilisation should be restored, along with reformulating the very understanding of leadership, which, as President Dmitry Medvedev pointed out in an article in The Washington Post, ought to be based on the desire and ability to reduce to a “common denominator” the interests of all members of the international community and of all major groups of states. The summits of the Group of 20 are a major step in this direction.
Today, many people associate the hope for changes for the better with the coming to power in Washington of the new administration. Under the previous administration, it was US actions, particularly as part of the course towards an intentional destabilisation of certain countries and whole regions (as Zbigniew Brzezinski acknowledges in his book “America and the World”, 2008) that largely determined the accumulation of a negative potential in global and regional politics. Abandoning this line, including the policy of containing all potential global competitors, would have a positive impact on the international situation.
Regardless of what decisions the Obama administration arrives at in the coming months, the very prospect of positive changes in our relations with the US and the West as a whole will work for bringing the general atmosphere of global and regional politics, primarily in the Euro-Atlantic area, to a healthy state. Under the Bush administration, the principle of equality was already established between Moscow and Washington, but of negative equality, since Russia refused to cooperate on the terms being imposed on it. The challenge now is to convert this equality into a positive dimension through mutually respectful practical collaboration on a broad agenda. It is then that a qualitative transformation of Russian-American relations will occur, including in the strategic context.
Russia and the United States, which continue to bear special responsibility for the destiny of the world, are called upon to play their role in the collective leadership of major states of the world. This calls for the restoration of trust in the first place. The Russian philosophy of a “new beginning” in our relations is clearly laid out by President Medvedev in his aforementioned article.
The multipolar world is linked with both opportunities and challenges, which will have to be answered together, and we are perfectly aware of this. A debate on ways of further social and world development is called for as never before. And Russia is entitled and in a position to take part in it on a par with others.
The writer is Russia's minister of foreign affairs. This article is reprinted with permission from the Russian embasssy in Amman.
By Sergey Lavrov
The Caucasus crisis and the world financial and economic crisis both came 20 years after the fall of the Berlin wall and the demise of the Soviet Union, and set the limits of the possible for the inertial policy pursued all these years, particularly along the lines of the previous political and psychological assumption behind the “containment” of Russia.
In so doing, some of our Western partners acted in the spirit of the notorious triumphalism based on the thesis of “cold war victory” and the possibility of a Western-style “world revolution”. It was because of this inertia that one could not talk about a conclusive end to the cold war; for many, it continued at world level, now as a virtual project of certain forces that pronounced the “end of history” and a “unipolar world”, and attempted to transfer all this into the sphere of fully concrete practical politics.
As for the new, democratic Russia, it simply withdrew from the cold war, renouncing the ideology that underlay the Soviet participation in it. That was the choice of the Russian people and the peoples of the other ex-Soviet republics.
If there was a “victory”, then the states and political forces that drew the right conclusions from what happened can be considered top winners. And here, I boldly assert, Russia turned out to be among the front-runners. It was easier for us to draw these conclusions; our partners acting in the spirit of “tough pragmatism” helped us shed illusions. And then, in purely objective terms, , taking into account the conditions of the 1990s, it was hard for us not to take a stand as a realistic, commonsensical nation.
On the other hand, it took the West effort to foresee the course of events and articulate a realistic, forward-looking policy in international affairs. Glimmers of a sober approach could be seen: one has only to refer here to Henry Kissinger's 1994 book “Diplomacy”, where he foresaw the emergence of a multipolar world, with a role for the United States as the “first among equals”. But a euphoria that had nothing to do with serious analysis, let alone forecasts, engulfed real politics at mass level, presupposing neither an individual interpretation of what is happening nor individual creativity. In international affairs, a purely consumerist approach prevailed.
The new Russia could not become a part of the Western world order, since the burden of proof regarding its universality lay with the West. Yet the West, represented primarily by the US, drew conclusions that turned out to be wrong. The Western world order was not created in the 1990s. Essentially, especially at economy and finance level, it already existed during the cold war, and after the Soviet collapse the question arose whether it could be universal. But this question wasn't given much thought. Meanwhile, the world entered a period of transition - from bipolar, where all major decisions were made in Washington and Moscow, to something freer, fairer and more democratic, presupposing a significantly broader consensus. This was fully in line with the globalisation tendencies, resulting in the appearance of new centres of global economic growth and political clout.
Now, to use the terminology of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, we are threatened with a stage of “deglobalisation”. A similar process was under way in the period after the Great Depression, when the tendencies towards autarchy prevailed and an exit was searched according to the principle “everyone for himself”, largely on the lines of the militarisation of the economy, which gave the push towards a new war. Unfortunately, wars did not play a role in the evolution of the Western democracy.
Arnold Toynbee noted another historical regularity: militarism served as a vehicle for the self-destruction of empires. It has to be stated that it was the militarisation of foreign policy that largely predetermined the choice of the cold war, with its irrational waste of all kinds of resources.
A feature of World War II and the cold war was that the struggle for survival initially, and then, the ideological confrontation ensured a high degree of motivation at state and individual level, which was a factor in the development of scientific and technological progress on both sides of the “barricades”. Let us hope that humanity will at last put an end to this and find other sources of technological development.
So far, it does not appear to be possible to guess in advance the concrete directions in which a new technological base for the global economy will proceed. But the motivation for a new technological breakthrough could be provided by the imperatives of sustainable development and addressing a broad spectrum of problems, particularly energy security and climate change, on which the survival of all humanity depends.
Now facing the crisis of global governance, it is difficult to escape the conclusion about its complex, systemic nature. I would not agree with the assertion that structured international relations existed in the last 20 years. It was rather a drift of what had been and what ultimately proved its inadequacy, faced with the new realities. Therefore, speculations about preserving the status quo appear to be pointless and, essentially, reactionary conservative.
It is evident that all elements of global governance are interlinked. There can be no stable world economic system if international security is unstable. Simply, the crisis manifested itself at the beginning at superstructure level and only now, having accumulated a critical mass, has descended into the financial and economic base.
British correspondents at the International Herald Tribune, in a piece on March 30, 2009, cited testimonies of London City experts who consider that the start of the process of loss of control over the international financial architecture, created at Bretton Woods, was linked with the breakup of the Soviet Union and the American triumphalism that followed it.
It is hard to argue with the opinion of a whole array of historians that the West's adoption of a socially oriented model of economic development, with reliance on the middle class, was the forced product of the cold war to a significant extent, when the ruling Western European and US elites reacted to the “challenge of the Soviet Union” along the lines of the “socialisation” of the economy. Probably only in way could the European society create a sustainable economic development model, realising at long last the French Revolution's promise of a more equitable social arrangement. The attempts at renunciation the socially oriented economic model led to “the crisis of a system that has drifted away from its most fundamental values”, to use Nicolas Sarkozy's words, including a sense of morality.
Presently at issue is not preserving dominance, which is impossible in the presence of a strong influence of cultural and civilisational diversity on the destinies of the world, but reinforcing the claim of the European civilisation to a place on the team of leaders at this new turn in the development of the world. To this end, the unity of the European civilisation should be restored, along with reformulating the very understanding of leadership, which, as President Dmitry Medvedev pointed out in an article in The Washington Post, ought to be based on the desire and ability to reduce to a “common denominator” the interests of all members of the international community and of all major groups of states. The summits of the Group of 20 are a major step in this direction.
Today, many people associate the hope for changes for the better with the coming to power in Washington of the new administration. Under the previous administration, it was US actions, particularly as part of the course towards an intentional destabilisation of certain countries and whole regions (as Zbigniew Brzezinski acknowledges in his book “America and the World”, 2008) that largely determined the accumulation of a negative potential in global and regional politics. Abandoning this line, including the policy of containing all potential global competitors, would have a positive impact on the international situation.
Regardless of what decisions the Obama administration arrives at in the coming months, the very prospect of positive changes in our relations with the US and the West as a whole will work for bringing the general atmosphere of global and regional politics, primarily in the Euro-Atlantic area, to a healthy state. Under the Bush administration, the principle of equality was already established between Moscow and Washington, but of negative equality, since Russia refused to cooperate on the terms being imposed on it. The challenge now is to convert this equality into a positive dimension through mutually respectful practical collaboration on a broad agenda. It is then that a qualitative transformation of Russian-American relations will occur, including in the strategic context.
Russia and the United States, which continue to bear special responsibility for the destiny of the world, are called upon to play their role in the collective leadership of major states of the world. This calls for the restoration of trust in the first place. The Russian philosophy of a “new beginning” in our relations is clearly laid out by President Medvedev in his aforementioned article.
The multipolar world is linked with both opportunities and challenges, which will have to be answered together, and we are perfectly aware of this. A debate on ways of further social and world development is called for as never before. And Russia is entitled and in a position to take part in it on a par with others.
The writer is Russia's minister of foreign affairs. This article is reprinted with permission from the Russian embasssy in Amman.
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