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Henry A. Kissinger

Outlook for the 21st century - Braunschweig University - 6/7/95

Herr Präsident Rebe, Herr Ministerpräsident, Freund Carl
Friedrich von Weizsäcker. Ich werde mir erlauben, einige Sätze
auf deutsch zu sagen. Ich weiß, daß nördlich des Mains mein
fränkischer Akzent besonders belustigend empfunden wird, so daß
sie froh sein werden, wenn ich auf englisch weitermache. Ich
denke über alle diese Probleme auf englisch, und wenn ich
versuche, eine Rede auf deutsch zu halten, und für mich selbst
übersetze, wird es immer schwieriger, je länger die Rede dauert.
Wenn ich jemals aufgefordert würde, eine Rede über Fußball zu
halten, könnte ich das glänzend auf deutsch, denn das war mein
Vokabular, als ich Deutschland verlassen habe. Aber jetzt werde
ich auf englisch fortfahren.

My subject is the outlook for the 21st century. I wish I could
give you a precise description, and prescription, of what the
21st century should look like, but in fact I have more questions
than answers.

We all speak of the new world order as if it has already arrived. Yet we are at the beginning of an extraordinarily complex process for which none of our countries has any previous experience. The United States has never been in a world which it could neither dominate nor withdraw from, and Europe has only recently entered a world in which the nation-state, as developed in the 19th century, is too small, while the appropriate broader unit has not yet been formed. Russia lives within borders that it has not experienced since *Peter the Great*. China and Japan, for the first time in their histories, are participating in global international politics. Beyond that, there is widespread incompatability between political convictions, economic realities and technological necessities.

The 19th century was a period of considerable progress, because
the political organization out of which evolved the nation-state
corresponded to economic realities. Thus the political unit that
was being governed reflected objective necessities and
possibilities of the period. Technology maintained a balance
between progress and what could be achieved by human labor. All
of these conditions are now fundamentally altered. We live in a
world of global economics dominated by at times seemingly
arbitrary decisions. When a young bank employee can create an
international financial crisis by manipulating 27 billion dollars
of currency on the basis of his own decision in the space of
three days, it is senseless to talk about management control in
the traditional sense.

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The other day I was being briefed by the management of one of the largest American banks. They proudly told me that when they had to assess a transaction with an opposite number, their analyst had 26 criteria to keep in mind as he sat before his computer screen. And I said to them: There are three problems you face as far as I can see. Assuming the fellow at the other side of the screen also has 26 criteria, what are the odds that they should be the same? Even more dangerously, what if the criteria don't match; or that they do match and everybody runs to the same side of the boat simultaneously and tips it over? This, by the way, is only with respect to a two-sided transaction. When you have hundreds of thousands of transactions taking place simultaneously and trillions of dollars of currency being moved daily, how can we predict, even less, how can we handle financial crises, and how can our political system survive? I have no answer to these questions. But neither did the bankers and they are the ones sitting at the computer screens.

No previous period has had to consider questions of this kind. In no previous period could statesmen observe events within the same spectrum and be expected to make definitive decisions in real time. This is all happening at a moment when the political consciousness of the majority of the populations affected by these decisions is, in my view, not expanding but possibly shrinking. And the sense of proportion between political loyalty and economic reality is waning. Indeed, there is a temptation by political leaders to use some foreign challenges as a means to realize their own domestic opinions.

These are the unprecedented conditions taking place in every country simultaneously and they make it extremely difficult to speak of a world order. By world order, I mean arrangements in the political, economic, social and scientific fields that are preceived to be legitimized by most ot those who have to preserve them - or at least legitimized enough so that they don't overthrow the whole system or seek adjustment through marginal changes. That is the fundamental challenge of our period.

It is compounded in the United States, and will be in other countries, by the fact that we are also living through a fundamental change in the generations. It is personally depressing to me when I find myself speaking of the younger generation. When I was a student, I considered people of my present age not as older versions of myself but as a different genus that had been placed in the world at a certain age and only at that age. They seemed to represent an altogether different type from myself for, as I am finding, when one reaches a certain stage, it is inevitable that there will be a difference in experience. Yet we are also witnessing a qualitative difference in perception similar to the one that occurred when printing was invented.

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My generation was brought up on books and learned through concepts. When you think in concepts, you have to relate disparate experiences to each other. My children's generation learned from pictures on television and on computers. They learned not from concepts but from impressions. I wasted my time trying to write elegantly, which helps the reader but is unnecessary for those who recieve their information on computer screens. Thus there has been created a different way of learning that we do not yet fully understand. It may be deeper in many respects but in a funny way there may also be less room for imagination because, when you read a novel, you have to create the image yourself; when you see a television performance, it is handed to you. And it has affected politics in a fundamental way.

When I was a young professor, political leaders, if they did ask my opinion, would ask me what to think. Today, political leaders ask me what to say. They are much more interested in sound bites, more driven by the evening news. They feel a need to react to the impressions that have been created among their constituents - and I don't say this as a criticism, it is simply reality. If I were in active politics today, I would be driven by the same necessities. Yet the test of great statesmen is in their ability to shape the future. It is their obligation to take their societies from where they are to where they have never been.

For this, they must have the intellectual and moral courage to walk alone, at least for some distance. In a democracy, this impulse must be balanced against the need for approval. Yet very little in our societies produces such inward strength, and very little in our political systems leads to the possibility of taking such a course and surviving it politically. When we talk about world order, who are the people who can take a broad enough view and are willing to walk that road? It is surely a challenge, one I consider to be among the questions to which I do not pretend to have an answer.

Let me illustrate what I mean by the example of some of the countries that compose the international system, and then I will return to the problem with which I began. First, the United States which, as I said before, finds itself in a world for which it has had very little preparation. America, populated largely by immigrants, has thrived in an environment in which it never had a security problem until well after the Second World War. Its people had turned away from Europe and believed that they had done better for it. They had faith in their internal qualities which they thought could be applied automatically to the world scale and would produce universal peace.

I have always been struck by the phenomenon of President Woodrow Wilson who, after over a century of American isolationism, emerged on the scene in 1917 saying that everything anybody had ever thought about foreign policy through the centuries was

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totally wrong. Instead, international affairs had to be reorganized according to principles nobody but Americans had ever heard of at that point. I am certainly not going to debate the issue of the merit of his views, but what I find so interesting is that not one leading American figure I can think of, either in academic life or in politics, thought to ask Wilson how he knew all this. Or what evidence he had for what he was saying. That was because Wilson reflected the deep American convictions that the spread of democracy automatically produces peace, that self-determination must be the key to international politics, and that the balance of power is inherently evil.

That foreign policy can be conducted on the basis of what I call psychiatric principles has never been seriously challenged in the United States. Today, for instance, we have the strange phenomenon that many of the people who were violently opposed to the Vietnam War - at the end, not at the beginning - and who used it as an example of America's immorality, are now urging that we go into Bosnia with exactly the same arguments they had used at the beginning of the Vietnam War. Thus a journalist at *The New York Times* who used to write the most passionate articles against the way Nixon and I extricated ourselves from Vietnam because it wasn't quick enough, now writes three times a week that America should engage in Bosnia. In fact, the extreme left and the extreme right in American politics have united on this point.

America now finds itself in a world of six or seven operationally equal power centers. I say operationally equal because, though in America we are told that we are the only superpower, this is only technically true in a military sense. But the issues which can be solved by military means alone are shrinking and the relevance of our military power to almost all of the issues you can imagine is declining. The problem is even more complex because Americans do not like to use military power for political reasons. They prefer to fight crusades. Yet what crusades are there to be fought? The Cold War is over; there is no ideological enemy or huge single task of construction.

To most Europeans, a world of six, maybe seven, more or less equal powers - more or less equal in the sense of what they can do to affect the course of events - would denote as self-evident the proposition that one aspect of such a challenge is having some idea of equilibrium. That is, some means of reducing the incentive for excessive action on the part of any one of the powers. That, however, is a very difficult concept to get across in the United States.

If you look at American foreign policy over just the last four weeks, you see that we have gotten into a fight with Japan, with China, with Iran and over Bosnia - all in that single four week period. One might say that prudence would have required separating one's opponents and not fighting them all

[LC]

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simultaneously. That, in America, this is not self-evident
reflects a conceptual problem which places Americans at the
beginning of a complex intellectual debate that has actually not
yet fully started. It will start with next year's presidential
campaign and it will take three to four years to work itself out.
For we need some definition of the national interest and some
concept of world order. All the more so as some of the heretofore
conventional wisdom being used by all participants of this world
order seems to be no longer self-evident.

For example, all of our Western societies with high industrial
capacities have not yet fully faced the problems of today. In the
19th century, technology and labour were in some balance. That
is, you could in the end increase production only by increasing
the work force. That is no longer true. You can increase
production substantially today by decreasing the workforce.
Therefore it is possible to have both economic growth and social
depression side by side. Indeed, the rationality of the modern
economies leads not only to unemployment of the traditional
manual labourers but also to the unemployment of the white collar
workers, creating a disaffected middle class. I mention it
because this reality may contribute to the demoralisation of all
Western societies at the moment when we face great challenges.
Economists dispute this but I think they are being too abstract.

When one travels to Asia - in China, South East Asia, soon India
and Indonesia - one sees the extraordinary industrial capacity
being created there by Western technology to the point that it is
equivalent to Western production methods. It is difficult to see
how that productive capacity can fail to lead to a levelling of
living standards around the world. And if that is so, then all
our societies have both domestic problems and an international
problem. They will have to ask themselves - not now when we are
selling the machinery but 25 years from now, when these machines
are producing - what will happen to the structures of our
societies and to the nature of international politics?

I would add one other element. We in the West - Europe, Latin
America and the United States - in our relations with each other
cannot conceive the use of military force in the settlement of
our disputes. Whatever else we do, a war between the European
states - outside ethnic conflicts in marginal alliance areas - or
between the major countries in the Western Hemisphere is
inconceivable. Now that is one pattern of international
relations. But it does not apply to other parts of the world. In
Asia, the relations of Japan, China, Korea, Indonesia, and the
Asian parts of Russia to each other are much more similar to 19th
century Europe or pre-World War II Europe than they are to the
present world. Thus we have simultaneously two different
approaches to world order. The one in the world of the
civilization we know best, and the one in other regions. And yet
some of these other regions like Africa do not have strategic

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conflicts, but rather ethnic conflicts at a level of violence that we have not seen since the Middle Ages, if ever. I have already said that the European nation-state is no longer adequate for the challenges of our period even though it dominated the last century. But in what form and into what units it organizes itself remains one of the unsolved problems.

I shall not talk about the relationship between the Maastricht Europe and the more confederated Europe, since this is primarily a problem for Europeans to solve. But I do believe that it is very important to define the boundaries of what the Europe is that is going to be formed by whatever method. In this regard we have all been neglectful: Europe with respect to the European Union, America and Europe with respect to NATO and leaving open the question of what happens to the former Soviet satellite states of Eastern Europe. All the technical issues will solve themselves once we know how we are delineated. The most dangerous thing we can do is to create a no-man's-land between Russia and Germany - that is to say Europe - which will tempt everybody into a national policy of trying to build in that vacuum and which will delay the organization of this Europe.

I do not believe that Russia is threatened by drawing Europe's border. I would take the opposite view and say, Russia is threatened most by having vacuums around its borders that will tempt it to go back to its historic policy of expansionism. Russia has always had a different tradition. Its religion is a state religion; it had no Enlightenment, no capitalism, no Age of Exploration. It therefore solves its problems in a different way than we do. And it has huge resources, together with nuclear weapons which make the danger of an invasion from Europe about zero percent.

Thus Russia's biggest problem is how - and for the first time in its history - it can be encouraged to turn to its own internal affairs and, in doing so, remain within its borders. If it can do that, it will have better prospects for democracy than by playing around with the various political forces now appearing in Moscow and that are, by definition, transitory phenomena. As the Atlantic region and Europe are built, we should extend a hand to Russia as well, recognising that its processes will be of a different nature.

Let me say a few words about Japan and China, which I visit quite often. Now if you ask a Westerner when a certain event happened, he will give you a date; when you ask a Chinese when an event happened, he gives you a dynasty. Most of these dynasties have lasted longer than the entire history of the United States. When you travel in China, you rarely come to a province which does not have a population larger than the largest European country, and you will never come to provinces with populations of a middle-sized European country, say the Netherlands. With a

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billion two hundred people, the entire rhythm is different and so is the perspective. Our countries could not conceive development on the basis of half a country being left out of it entirely.

When Germany became unified, the decision was made that it was impossible to leave the new states in a differentiated position from the Federal Republic, even for a few years. In China, this has been the fate of six hundred million people while the rest of the country advances very rapidly. Still, there has been fantastic progress in China. Again, the rhythm is different as are the restraints on government.

In Washington, when an overture is made to Taiwan, we have the tendency to explain it to Beijing on the ground that it doesn't mean anything. Naturally, their first question is: If it does not mean anything, why do you do it? Why would you do meaningless things? What the Chinese want from the United States is to understand how we are going to operate the Asian balance of power. And that is the one question we can't answer because we don't think of it that way. Instead, we go to the Chinese and lecture them on economics and all the agenda items of liberal American democracy on the supposition that this will also contribute to universal peace. And when the Chinese say that we provoke them, it reflects a genuine difference in perspective that could affect the international order. The Chinese have been around for many thousands of years and they are willing to adjust to the preconceptions of others. But they are not willing to accept outsiders' internal political philosophies, especially of countries which, for a hundred years, did not treat them with excessive respect.

And then there is Japan. Americans and the rest of us in general believe that conversion is a tool of foreign policy. Thus we tended to think that Japan in 1945 had undergone a fundamental change. But Japan lived in total isolation for 500 years with no contact whatever with the outside world, and its history goes back two thousand years. Its institutions are perhaps the most special and particular of any country in the world, being more like those of a family than of a nation. To them, the idea of such a fundamental change is not all that self-evident.

I once had a meeting with a group of eminent Japanese and I was fascinated by the phenomena of Japanese politics whereby their major parties are divided into factions and the leaders of those factions are not elected but appointed by their predecessors - in other words, they are feudal instruments. Prime Ministers are also not elected in Japan but produced by agreement within the faction. And they are always reported between elections, not after an election. So I asked the group: Has it ever happened that a member of a faction voted against his faction leader? They found it an interesting question and began going back, cabinet by cabinet, and before they knew it, they were in the 1930s. In

8

their minds, there was not such a big difference between the cabinets of the 1950s and 1960s - either structurally or in terms of policy - and the huge cabinets of the 1930s. A country with such a sense of self-assurance could nestle under American protection only so long as there was one enemy. But with the emergence of Asian pluralism and the decline of America's capacity - let alone its willingness - to influence events, the Japanese military budget today is the third largest in the world. It is being used in the way the German military force was built in the 1920s and early 1930s, to create a basis for rapid expansion without yet embarking on it. And Japanese policy will become more assertive. I am not saying more anti-American, but more assertive. All of this should indicate that there are indeed huge challenges when we talk about world order.

In the United States our big problem is that the Vietnam War wrecked the sense of central community within the intellectual community. When I was a young professor, my colleagues and I never expected to get into high government positions. We thought that the way to effect events was to think five or ten years ahead. And we were working on problems some of which Professor von Weizsäcker participated in, such as arms control. As a result of the Vietnam War, the social science part of the intellectual community has become divided between those who want to make revolution and those who want to be job applicants. A part wants to undermine the system, and another part wants to get a job in Washington. Neither is contributing to long-range thinking. On the issue of Bosnia, we had a real debate going on in America. Is Bosnia another Munich, or is it a Vietnam?

But I do not want to get into that here, only to speak of the need to think through these issues. I have no answers to all the problems I have presented. I have only one general condition and it is this: In the world that I have described, it is nearly imperative that the nations of the West - that is, the Western Hemisphere and a Europe consisting of NATO plus most of the former Soviet satellite countries - form some kind of political and economic community to deal with the political, economic and social crises that are inevitable within each of the countries if current technological trends continue. It is going to be tough enough to deal with these problems even if we are united. But if we reexhaust ourselves in exercising the nationalisms that have been the scourge of Western Civilization in these parts, we have no future at all - especially in the face of the migrations and the fundamentalism that lie ahead. One idea of how to achieve this - just to have something to start with - is the North Atlantic Free Trade Area. But I am not here to push any particular idea; I was asked to speak about the order of the 21st century, and I have tried to raise some of the issues on my mind.

Let me conclude with a Spanish proverb which may be relevant. The

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proverb says: "*Traveller, there are no roads. Roads are made by walking.*" I think that is the challenge to our societies right now, and that is how the 21st century world order will come into being.

Prof. Henry Kissinger Ph.D., geb. 1923 in Fürth, Studium an der Harvard University, 1954 Promotion, 1951-1971 Direktor des Internationalen Seminars der Harvard University, 1954-1971 Professor dort, 1968-1973 außen- und sicherheitspolitischer Berater der US-Regierung, 1973-1977 Außenminister der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika, seitdem Berater internationaler Firmen und Verbände, 1973 gemeinsam mit Le Duc Tho Friedensnobelpreis, 1987 Karlspreis der Stadt Aachen.

As FedExed
with disc

4/2/96

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Henry A. Kissinger

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questions than answers.

We all speak of the new world order as if it has already arrived. Yet we are at the beginning of an extraordinarily complex process for which none of our countries has any previous experience. The United States has never been in a world which it could neither dominate nor withdraw from, and Europe has only recently entered a world in which the nation-state, as developed in the 19th century, is too small, while the appropriate broader unit has not yet been formed. Russia lives within borders that it has not experienced since Peter the Great. China and Japan, for the first time in their histories, are participating in global international politics. Beyond that, there is widespread incompatability between political convictions, economic realities and technological necessities.

[LC]

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[LC]

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[LC]

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[LC]

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[LC]

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[L.C.]

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I have always been struck by the phenomenon of President Woodrow Wilson who, after over a century of American isolationism, emerged on the scene in 1917 saying that everything anybody had ever thought about foreign policy through the centuries was totally wrong. Instead, international affairs had to be reorganized according to principles nobody but Americans had ever heard of at that point. I am certainly not going to

[LC]

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[L.C.]

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[L]

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If you look at American foreign policy over just the last four weeks, you see that we have gotten into a fight with Japan, with China, with Iran and over Bosnia - all in that single four week period. One might say that prudence would have required separating one's opponents and not fighting them all simultaneously. That, in America, this is not self-evident reflects a conceptual problem which places Americans at the beginning of a complex intellectual debate that has actually not yet fully started. It will start with next year's presidential campaign and it will take three to four years to work itself out. For we need some definition of the national interest and some concept of world order. All the more so as some of the heretofore conventional wisdom being used by all participants of this world order seems to be no longer self-evident.

[LC]

12

[L.C]

13

[L]

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century Europe or pre-World War II Europe than they are to the present world. Thus we have simultaneously two different approaches to world order. The one in the world of the civilization we know best, and the one in other regions. And yet some of these other regions like Africa do not have strategic conflicts, but rather ethnic conflicts at a level of violence that we have not seen since the Middle Ages, if ever. I have already said that the European nation-state is no longer adequate for the challenges of our period even though it dominated the last century. But in what form and into what units it organizes itself remains one of the unsolved problems.

[L.C]

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[LJ]

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Let me say a few words about Japan and China, which I visit
quite often. Now if you ask a Westerner when a certain event
happened, he will give you a date; when you ask a Chinese when an
event happened, he gives you a dynasty. Most of these dynasties
have lasted longer than the entire history of the United States.
When you travel in China, you rarely come to a province which
does not have a population larger than the largest European
country, and you will never come to provinces with populations of
a middle-sized European country, say the Netherlands. With a
billion two hundred people, the entire rhythm is different and so

[LC]

17

[LC]

18

[LC]

19

I once had a meeting with a group of eminent Japanese and I was fascinated by the phenomena of Japanese politics whereby their major parties are divided into factions and the leaders of those factions are not elected but appointed by their predecessors - in other words, they are feudal instruments. Prime Ministers are also not elected in Japan but produced by agreement within the faction. And they are always reported between elections, not after an election. So I asked the group: Has it ever happened that a member of a faction voted against his faction leader? They found it an interesting question and began going back, cabinet by cabinet, and before they knew it, they were in the 1930s. In their minds, there was not such a big difference between the cabinets of the 1950s and 1960s - either structurally or in terms of policy - and the huge cabinets of the 1930s. A country with such a sense of self-assurance could nestle under American protection only so long as there was one enemy. But with the emergence of Asian pluralism and the decline of America's capacity - let alone its willingness - to influence

[LC]

20

events, the Japanese position is bound to alter. The Japanese military budget today is the third largest in the world. It is being used in the way the German military force was built in the 1920s and early 1930s, to create a basis for rapid expansion without yet embarking on it. And Japanese policy will become more assertive. I am not saying more anti-American, but more assertive. All of this should indicate that there are indeed huge challenges when we talk about world order.

[LC]

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Let me conclude with a Spanish proverb which may be
relevant. The proverb says: "*Traveller, there are no roads. Roads
are made by walking.*" I think that is the challenge to our
societies right now, and that is how the 21st century world order
will come into being.

WITH GINA'S EDITS

1

Bravuschweig Univ.

June 7, 1998

My subject is the outlook for the 21st century. I wish I
could give you a precise description, and prescription, of what
the 21st century should look like but in fact I have more

[Y]

2

questions than answers.

We all speak of the new world order as if it has already arrived. Yet we are at the beginning of an extraordinarily complex process for which none of our countries has any previous experience. The United States has never been in a world which it could neither dominate nor withdraw from, and Europe has only recently entered a world in which the nation-state, as developed in the 19th century, is too small while the appropriate broader unit has not yet been formed. Russia lives within borders that it has not experienced since Peter the Great. China and Japan, for the first time in their histories, are participating in global international politics. Beyond that, there is widespread incompatability between political convictions, economic realities and technological necessities.

The 19th century was a period of considerable progress because the political organization out of which evolved the nation-state corresponded to economic realities. Thus the political unit that was being governed reflected objective

3

necessities and possibilities of the period. Technology
maintained a balance between progress and what could be achieved
by human labor. All of these conditions are now fundamentaly
altered. We live in a world of global economics dominated by at
times seemingly arbitrary decisions. When a young bank employee
can create an international financial crisis by manipulating 27
billion dollars of currency on the basis of his own decision in
the space of three days, it is senseless to talk about management
control in the traditional sense.

[Y]

4

5

These are the unprecedented conditions taking place in every
country simultaneously and they make it extremly difficult to
speak of a world order. By world order, I mean arrangements in
the political, economic, social and scientific fields that are
preceived to be legitimized by most ot those who have to preserve
them - or at least legitimized enough so that they don't
overthrow the whole system or seek adjustment through marginal
changes. That is the fundamental challenge of our period.

It is compounded in the United States, and will be in other
countries, by the fact that we are also living through a
fundamental change in the generations. It is personally
depressing to me when I find myself speaking of the younger
generation. Because, when I was a student, I considered people of
my present age not as older versions of myself but as a different
genus that had been placed in the world at a certain age and only
at that age. They seemed to represent an altogether different
type from myself for, as I am finding, when one reaches a certain
stage, it is inevitable that there will be a difference in

6

My generation was brought up on books and learned through
concepts. When you think in concepts, you have to relate
disparate experiences to each other. My children's generation
learned from pictures on television and on computers. They
learned not from concepts but from impressions. I wasted my time
trying to write elegantly, which helps the reader but is
unnecessary for those who recieve their information on computer
screens. Thus has been created a different way of learning that
we do not yet fully understand. It may be deeper in many respects
but in a funny way there may also be less room for imagination
because, when you read a novel, you have to create the image
yourself; when you see a television performance, it is handed to
you. And it has affected politics in a fundamental way.

7

leaders ask me what to say. They are much more interested in
sound bits, more driven by the evening news. They feel a need to
react to the impressions that have been created among their
constituents - and I don't say this as a criticism, it is simply
reality. If I were in active politics today, I would be driven by
the same necessities. Yet the test of great statesmen is in their
ability to shape the future. It is their obligation to take their
societies from where they are to where they have never been.

8

Let me illustrate what I mean by the example of some of the
countries that compose the international system, and than I will
return to the problem with which I began. First, the United
States which, as I said before, finds itself in a world for which
it has had very little preparation. America, populated largely by
immigrants, has thrived in an environment in which it never had a
security problem until well after the Second World War. Its
people had turned away from Europe and believed that they had
done better for it. They had faith in their internal qualities
which they thought could be applied automatically to the world
scale and would produce universal peace.

9

debate the issue of the merit of his views but what I find so
interesting is that not one leading American figure I can think
of, either in academic life or in politics, thought to ask Wilson
how he knew all this. Or what evidence he had for what he was
saying. That was because Wilson reflected the deep American
convictions that the spread of democracy automatically produces
peace, that self-determination must be the key to international
politics, and that the balance of power is inherently evil.

[Y]

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wasn't quick enough, now writes three times a week that America
should engage in Bosnia. In fact, the extreme left and the
extreme right in American politics have united on this point. I
find myself being battered, having gotten out of Vietnam too
slowly, for now not being in favor of going into Bosnia at all.
But that is a different issue. Nor am I arguing the merits of
these theses, rather I am describing the American mentality.

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To most Europeans, a world of six, maybe seven, more or less equal powers - more or less equal in the sense of what they can do to effect the course of events - would denote as self-evident the proposition that one aspect of such a challenge is having some idea of equilibrium. That is, some means of reducing the incentive for excessive action on the part of any one of the powers. That, however, is a very difficult concept to get across in the United States.

If you look at American foreign policy over just the last four weeks, you see that we have gotten into a fight with Japan, with China, with Iran and over Bosnia - all in that single four week period. One might say that prudence would have required separating one's opponents and not fighting them all simultaneously. That, in America, this is not self-evident reflects a conceptual problem which places Americans at the beginning of a complex intellectual debate that has actually not yet fully started. It will start with next year's presidential campaign and it will take three to four years to work itself out.

[Y]

12

[Y]

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are being too abstract.

When one travels to Asia - in China, South East Asia, soon India and Indonesia - one sees the extraordinary industrial capacity being created there by Western technology, to the point that it is equivalent to Western production methods. It is difficult to see how that productive capacity can fail to lead to a levelling of living standards around the world. And if that is so, then all our societies have both domestic problems and an international problem. They will have to ask themselves - not now when we are selling the machinery but 25 years from now, when these machines are producing - what will happen to the structures of our societies and to the nature of international politics?

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inconceivable. Now that is one pattern of international
relations. But it does not apply to other parts of the world. It
would say that, if you travel to Asia, the relations of Japan,
China, Korea, Indonesia, and the Asian parts of Russia to each
other are much more similar to 19th century Europe or pre-World
War II Europe than they are to the present world. Thus we have
simultaneously two different approaches to world order. The one
in the world of the civilization we know best, and the one in
other regions. And yet some of these other regions like Africa do
not have strategic conflicts, but rather ethnic conflicts at a
level of violence that we have not seen since the Middle Ages, if
ever. I have already said that the European nation-state is no
longer adequate for the challenges of our period even though it
dominated the last century. But in what form and into what units
it organizes itself remains one of the unsolved problems.

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This is all the more of a problem because, contrary to many
views, I do not believe that Russia is threatened by drawing
Europe's border. I would take the opposite view and say, Russia
is threatened most by having vacuums around its borders that will
tempt it to go back to its historic policy of expansionism.
Russia has always had a different tradition. Its religion is a
state religion; it had no Enlightenment, no capitalism, no Age of

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Thus Russia's biggest problem is how - and for the first time in its history - it can be encouraged to turn to its own internal affairs and in doing so remain within its borders. If it can do that, it will have better prospects for democracy than by playing around with the various political forces now appearing in Moscow and that are, by definition, transitory phenomena. As the Atlantic region and Europe are built, we should extend a hand to Russia as well, recognising that its processes will be of a different nature.

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When you travel in China, you rarely come to a province which does not have a population larger than the largest European country, and you will never come to provinces with populations of a middle-sized European country, say the Netherlands. A Luxembourg is inconceivable. With a billion two hundred people, the entire rhythm is different and so is the perspective. Our countries could not conceive development on the basis of half a country being left out of it entirely.

When Germany became unified, the decision was made that it was impossible to leave the new states in a differentiated position from the Federal Republic, even for a few years. In China, this has been deemed to be six hundred million people while the rest of the country advances very rapidly. It has happened to me in China that, though I am told by the central government about its economic program, when I visit a province close by the governor of that province - not some radical - explains that he has his own resources and describes a program that has no relationship to that of the central government. And while he pays

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his taxes to the central government, he feels free to race money
on the international market wherever he can get it. As
inconceivable as that is in any Western society, there has been
fantastic progress in China. Again, the rhythm is different as
are the restraints on government.

Western businessmen come to me and say that they are
desperate to get arbitration clauses into their business deals
with the Chinese. That is incomprehensible in China where you
cannot settle these disputes in court. Basically, they keep their
agreements but if necessity forces them to break an agreement,
they cannot for the life of them understand why they should not
break the arbitration clause as well.

In Washington, when an overture is made to Taiwan we have
the tendency to explain it to Beijing on the ground that it
doesn't mean anything. Naturally, their first question is: If it
does not mean anything, why do you do it? Why would you do
meaningless things? What the Chinese want from the United States
is to understand how we are going to operate the Asian balance of

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I once had a meeting with a group of eminent Japanese and I
was fascinated by the phenomena of Japanese politics whereby
their major parties are divided into factions and the leaders of
those factions are not elected but appointed by their
predecessors - in other words, they are feudal instruments.
Prime ministers are also not elected in Japan but produced by
agreement within the faction. And they are always reported
between elections, not after an election. So I asked the group:
Has it ever happened that a member of a faction voted against his
faction leader? They found it an interesting question and began
going back, cabinet by cabinet, and before they knew it, they
were in the 1930s. In their minds, there was not such a big
difference between the cabinets of the 1950s and 1960s - either
structurally or in terms of policy - and the huge cabinets of the
1930s. A country with such a sense of self-assurance could nestle

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But with the emergence of Asian pluralism and the decline of America's capacity - let alone its willingness - to influence events, the Japanese position is bound to alter. The Japanese military budget today is considerably larger than the German military budget, but nobody seems to pay attention to that. And it is the third largest in the world. It is being used in the way the German military force was built in the 1920s and early 1930s, to create a basis for rapid expansion without yet embarking on it. And Japanese policy will become more assertive. I am not saying more anti-American, but more assertive. All of this should indicate that there are indeed huge challenges when we talk about world order.