Mr President, I have to apologize to you. When you were on a visit to Washington in 1987, we were talking at a White House reception and you asked if I had read your book Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World.[1] I said I had and you asked what I thought of it. I said frankly that I had not been particularly impressed. The truth was that the thoughts there seemed to me insufficiently bold and radical. Recently, however, I was reading the correspondence between Catherine the Great and Diderot and I was struck by what she wrote: ‘You, M. Diderot, propose sweeping changes, but you write on paper, which is very durable, whereas I must write on human skin, and that is very sensitive.’ I understand you much better now.
Truly, reform in any country cannot be carried out using a stereotype, in accordance with the Washington Consensus or the recipes of the International Monetary Fund. That is only too reminiscent of our own attempts to graft the Soviet model onto other countries. Foreign advisers rarely have an understanding of the obstacles from history and the particularities of the culture and mentality of the nation where the reforms are being conducted. It has to be admitted that we, the reformers in the second half of the 1980s, did not take full account of them either. That was even more true of the radicals who came to power after us.
The changes that will come in Russia and that she so desperately needs cannot and should not be a repeat of Perestroika. There is no question, however, but that changes will come, and the longer they are delayed, the more painful they will be.
Just like Perestroika, these changes will come about not in a vacuum, but in the context of all the other processes taking place in the world. These are primarily the ongoing process of globalization and the accelerating pace of changes that the world’s politicians are struggling to keep up with. They are the search to find responses to the global challenges of security, poverty and the environment.
These are not processes that began yesterday: they were having a major impact on the world and on our country in the years of Perestroika. Since the end of the Cold War, they have only speeded up. There is, however, one feature that makes their current phase different, and that is that today the model guiding the development of civilization, elaborated during the twentieth century and entrenched in its last decades, is showing ever more alarming signs of dysfunctionality.
The economic crisis that began in 2008 is the crisis of a civilization. Although it may seem to be over the worst, politicians should not allow themselves to be fooled. There is an urgent need to devise a new model for global development. If we stay with the present model, the world will be doomed to further worsening and aggravation of global threats and challenges. The economy and politics are now linked even more closely. If globalization leads us further towards a world economy of super-profits and hyperconsumption, and world politics fails to find a path towards a more just and secure world order, mankind will face a period of global chaos and social upheaval. These cautions are not alarmist, not panic-mongering, but the apprehensions of someone who has seen and experienced much in the course of his life.
I do not have a recipe for the new development model. It can be arrived at only through concerted effort, through demanding intellectual and political searching. A general consensus needs to be arrived at on what kind of world people want to live in. In my view, that world cannot be based solely on personal, selfish interests, on constant growth of material needs and their satisfaction through endless industrial expansion. Is it not already clear where that leads? The world is being turned into a gigantic machine grinding up mineral resources and leaving behind mountains of waste, which are disposed of by being buried and which pollute the earth, the air and water resources. All the while, in the rapidly developing countries and regions, people cannot breathe the air. Of course, the challenge can partly be met with the aid of new technologies, tax incentives and the like, but almost certainly that will be insufficient. Ultimately, what is needed is a reorientation of the world economy, moving the focus of attention away from excessive individual consumption to such public goods as environmental security, human health, the quality of people’s lives and development of the human personality.
I may be accused of utopianism, even of a return to communist illusions or, at best, of underestimating self-interest as a driver of economic development. We all know, it may be said, where that leads, and did lead in Russia. It will be argued that hundreds of millions of people do not yet have even their most basic needs satisfied. These are cogent arguments. In seeking to devise the new model for civilization, we certainly need to take account of the mistakes of the past even while addressing the tasks of the present. That is precisely why the model should be a synthesis of different values: social democratic, traditionalist conservative, liberal, environmental and national. The advocates of all ideologies need to be aware that right now modern civilization has no answers to many questions, and to find them, a synthesis of approaches is needed. Ideologies must evolve.
The search for a new development model for civilization is no easy task and many believe it to be beyond our power. But let us think back to the late 1970s and early 1980s when the world faced a threat to the very existence of mankind. Mountainous stockpiles of deadly weapons had been built up and the arms race was accelerating. Tension was growing, hundreds of nuclear missiles were in a state of readiness to be launched instantly. It seemed impossible to get out of that situation and that the world was moving steadily towards catastrophe, but together we managed to pull back from the abyss, to halt the Cold War and initiate a process that culminated in a vast reduction of nuclear stockpiles.
No more today can we afford to panic, to drift downriver with the current. Drawing on the experience of those years, we need to seize the new opportunities that appeared with the end of the Cold War and take decisive action.
Russia, with her as yet far from realized potential, will be able to participate in the search for answers to these universal challenges, but to do so she needs to become strong and must modernize. I believe Russia can and will achieve that, but I see her being successful only if she follows the path of democracy.
Of late, the word ‘democracy’ has figured rarely in the speeches of Russian politicians. Disillusionment with democracy is also rife among the citizens of Russia, and not only of Russia. A rolling back of the wave of democracy after its tumultuous inroads in the late 1980s and early 1990s has been a global phenomenon. There are serious reasons for that, of which the most important has been that the democratic leaders were not always competent to deal with the situation and often fell short of expectations. I am convinced, however, that there is no alternative to democracy.
Different countries come to democracy by different routes and practise its principles in different ways. In historical terms, many countries that today boast a stable, successful democracy only recently passed through difficult and even horrifying times. This is true both of Germany and Chile, of Argentina and Japan. A little over a century ago, the Scandinavian countries were experiencing famine. Nowadays democracy is practised in all these countries in the forms best suited to their national circumstances. Russia too will have to build a democracy that takes account of and builds on its cultural characteristics, traditions, mentality and national character.
1
Mikhail Gorbachev,