Forum 2000 – 12 October 1998

Henry Kissinger

Mr. Chairman, Mr. President, friends, it is a great honor for me to be invited to appear here and no one except the President could have succeeded in doing this. I have been an extraordinary admirer of the President. I was one of those diplomats who could (basket 3) into the European security conference in Helsinki, in which we tried to make human rights some kind of international concern. But I say that not to mandate any credit for it because we had no idea what people like Havél would do with it. We thought that it would be sort of a defensive mechanism for marginal cases. And certainly there appeared this man whom none of us had ever heard, no idea, followed no practical principles for international politics, and helped, helped free his country. He, uh, to do great things, forgive me Mr. President, you have to be a little bit naïve. You have to ignore practical obstacles, and you have to remember that every great thing was an idea before it became a reality. I - the President asked me to come here, he didn't exactly tell me what I should talk about. He didn't give me this awe inspiring list of questions or I would probably have tried to escape. And so, what I will try to do, is to put before you a few reflections of somebody who has been a professor and who has been a pracicing statesman, and who has seen therefore international affairs from the academy and from the negotiating room. It, uh, and I would like, before I get to complete those issues, to make one or two philosophical observations, before my friend Hans Kuhn extracts it from me, painfully.

There is an inevitable difference in perspective between the
philosopher and the statesman, between the prophet and the diplomat. The
philosopher is concerned with the clarity of ideas. And he is responsible to
the most perfect formulation which he is capable of achieving. He is
responsible in the first instance, to his conscience. And, he has the privilege
of changing his mind, or of evolving. The statesman deals with a series of
imperfections. He cannot achieve, or only in the rarest cases, can he achieve
his objective in one dramatic encounter. He has to operate in stages. Every
stage is imperfect in relation of the totality of what can be achieved. And
therefore, so evey stage provides an alibi, for stoppings, and for confining
yourself to, to that stage. Great statesmen require moral conviction. The
hardest task of any statesman is to take his society from where it is to where
it has never been. And he must do that at a time when the consequences of
his action are not clear. And rare, he can gain the strength for such actions
only from some kind of moral compass. I therefore don't accept the division
between realism and idealism which is so much the, uh, subject of
contemporary debate. The statesman of course, must be a realist, but a great
deal depends on what content he gives to reality and how he perceives it, and
how he sees it evolving. It is true, that many crimes and much suffering has
been inflicted in the name of realism. But it is also true, that perhaps even
more crimes have been committed by prophets who believe in the
absoluteness of their idea, the impossibility of good faith on those who
oppose them. And in our time, I would say idealists, or so called idealists,
have not, inevitably contributed to the improvement of humanity. And
therefore I would say the biggest challenge those of us in this room who are
concerned with contemporary issues have, is to understand what the goal is
towards which we're striving, how, what means are available to achieve it,

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not to be overwhelmed by instruments, but also not to wallow in an orgy of
self-righteousness about ultimate goals. This is the basic philosophical
framework from which I want to address this.

Second question what I want to address, is the remark of the
Chairman. The United States is the only superpower. And much of what I
say will be taken form the American point of view, if only because I know it
best, but also because it is symptomatic of some of the problems of our day.
The United States is the only superpower in only one field of activity, and
that is the military. It is true, the United States is the only country that has a
military capacity to intervene everywhere in the world. But the issues in the
name of which we are supposed to intervene are on the one hand shrinking,
and on the other are becoming extraordinarily esoteric. They are shrinking
in the sense that the weapons in which we are most developed (there is the
nuclear arsenal) are useless in most of the conflicts that we know about.
And that they are being elaborated for contingencies that no one can
describe. It has never happened in history that mankind has based its
security on weapons with which there is absolutely no practical experience,
and in which the relationship between objectives, means, and goals is so, to
put it kindly, elusive. So, in that category we are indeed a superpower, but
we have no clear-cut objective. In the other category, the one we are
concerned with today, for example, on a day to day basis, uh, Kosovo, this is
not really a question of means, it is a question of ends. Almost every single
European power, and all European powers together and truly the combined
force of NATO, will be able to impose its will. But the question is to what
end, and what the purpose of the exercise is. I confess, uh, I don't see an end
today the deployment of B-52s. It is beyond my comprehension what they
are supposed to do in an ethnic conflict at the edge of the Balkans, and while

I am not here to discuss contemporary issues, I do want to say this. There is a tendency to say this is caused by a war criminal called Milosovic. I have, will express no opinion on that subject I will express the opinion however-No one man can cause the ethnic crisis in the Balkans. It is a crisis of the interaction between Islam and Christianity at the edge of the Balkans, which has been going on for hundreds of years. The interaction of societies, and in which one has to be very careful, that when the human rights of the suffering are preserved, an objective I strongly support, that we have not created new units that will pursue new ethnic conflicts in neighboring countries. And I actually hope that the central european presidents who are meeting today, might consider the political question of how the relationship of the Albanian and Christian populations in that region can be regulated, so that in a concrete way, so that we do not just talk of latitudes on television, but talk in a concrete manner, that when, everything is over, we know who will relate to whom so that we do not start a whole new cycle of conflicts in which every ethnic group then seeks redefinition by means of outside intervention and military conflicts. But I strongly support efforts to stop the immediate killing. But it is not a question of the immediate killing. But the fundamental problem in the world is not Kosovo. The fundamental problem in the world is that almost every society is undergoing huge changes in which the world in which it lives is unrelated to any historical experience. The next speaker will talk about the emergence of a united Europe. It will be one of the extraodinary facts of our period. But I believe that the technical side of European unification is far ahead of the political side of European unification. I have never imagined that there could be such a thing as a central bank unrelated to any political institutions. And therefore political institutions, inevitably, have to develop and in fact with respect to

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Europe, for an outsider, I view two contradictory propositions. The first is, I don't see how it can possibly succeed. And the second is, I don't see how it can possibly fail. So I'm suspended between two equally plausible propositions. And I suspect it will succeed. Which will be a huge psychic shock to all the people whose political consciousness has been formed around the nation state for three hundred years. It will also be a psychic shock to the United States, which has not yet had to deal with a wrestling partner of such magnitude. And finally I think it is important, if I would say the most important that this united Europe, what I hope for this united Europe, is that if it succeeds in unifying, it can overcome the hereditary disaster of Europe which is jealousy and competitiveness of a certain short-term nature. I believe it is important for the societies who practice democracy and who have been brought up on more or less the same democratic institutions, to cooperate. I believe that if Europe specializes in its historic competitive instincts, vis a vis North America, that it will contribute to radicalizing the whole rest of the world, rather than to bring it together. Uh, and so I think the next phase on both sides of the Atlantic will be, should be, a serious institutional attempt to find cooperative structures. Of course, the European crisis is a relatively benign one. In Russia we have wasted seven years by not recognizing that we are facing, we have seen, the collapse in, of, a whole way of looking at the world. It was not just that communism that collapsed in 1990, Russian imperialism collapsed. And the attitude in which identity was sought in expansion and domination of neighboring countries. The most important problem in Russia is to see whether they can be made comfortable in a territory which has nine time zones, from St. Petersburg to Vladivostov. So they should not feel claustrophobic in that territory. And the foreign policy problem is not to

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give lectures about market economics and abstract liberal democracy at the
University of Moscow. The problem is, can Russians feel that the borders
they have now are compatible with their security? In which case, it will be
relatively easy to find not only methods of coexistence, but methods of
cooperation between Russia and the rest of the world. I have been a strong
advocate of Polish, Czech, and Hungarian membership in NATO. Not from
a military point of view primarily, but from the point of view of returning
country to its history and being identified with the West. To the values and
structures from which they must rely as part of their identity. It's a
somewhat different problem from Russia, whose history diverged, and has
not shared many of these experiences. But I would believe that how to
integrate Russia and how to relate to it is something in which a, it is not
simply enough to repeat endlessly the slogans of market economics and
liberal democracy and it is an area in which some understanding for the
particular problems and the, of this- I was not a great advocate of the kind of
economic assistance program that has been extended to Russia, which was
kind of a ripoff, turned into a kind of a ripoffm but I am in favor in this crisis
of making sure that there is no starvation. And that the humane assistance
that is needed to get through his immediate period is given. I have been told
to talk for only twenty minutes, which is an unlikely demand. You know my
native language is German, and Anatole France once said he couldn't really
say he read Kant. He read nine volumes but the word was in the tenth. So
it's easy to go on, and I just would like to make two observations. First is I
have not discussed Asia and I would like to make one observation from the
American point of view. We are described as the only superpower. But we
are the only superpower in the world that has never has an enemy at its
borders. We are the only superpower that could imagine that its

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involvement in international affairs depended entirely up to us, was entirely
up to us. The only superpower where you could publish a book the end of
history and become very popular, because there is a belief that, that
everything is working towards a final conclusion. The only superpower that
presented all its programs to itself with a terminal date. There's nobody in
Prague with any education who could have believed that we can send troops
to Bosnia and they could leave in one year because the problem of Bosnia
would be solved. That is an American, that is possible only in America. So
here's a country with huge responsibilities that believes that everything has a
final solution, and crisis are not endemic, but that crisis are aborptions, that
you can overcome with programs. In what other country would it be
possible to believe that a society like China, which after all, has a history of
five thousand years, and which managed to get through four thousand eight
hundred of them without advice from the United States, would be totally
open to how the United States might conceive its domestic structure. I keep
telling my friends in Washington, when they keep telling me how foolish the
Japanese are, I said the Japanese overcame the Black ships, unconditional
surrender, and the energy crisis. Have they suddenly become stupid? What,
I ask, in Washington, do they say to each other, when they don't take their
own advice? Or is it possible that they have a different way of looking at
these problems? That they are operating on a different theory? I am not
saying they are right, but I am saying we have to understand it. And this
gets me to my absolutely last point, which is this:

I am not an economist, and in fact, when I was in government, the
then Secretary of Treasury said that my knowledge of economics was the
best argument against universal suffrage he had ever known. Of course he
showed his knowledge of politics then by calling the Shah of Iran a Nazi in

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the middle of the energy crisis. Which didn't show great political insight either, but anyway, I have been uneasy for years about this view of a global economy in which the whole world operates as one market and in which people are asked to accept suffering for the efficacy of an abstract market, without other criteria, and I have, in my limited circles, predicted that this would lead to some sort of a debacle because societies will not accept unlimited deprivations. Now we have the global economic crisis. In my view, the global economic crisis has become so severe because the technical economists have treated it, without regard for the political and moral capacities of the people that were involved. And they have turned a currency crisis into an economic crisis, and an economic crisis into a political crisis in many countries. And now, they find without a political framework, they can't even solve their technical problems. So I would say, what is absolutely imperative, is to try to come to some understanding of what the political structure of the world should be. We can multiply in lending institutions and we can come up with this technical gimmick or that technical gimmick. That does not solve the problem that if the societies that have to implement them are no longer considered just by their populations, and if the whole system is thrown into question, none of the technical IMF and other solutions will work. And so, in the field of economics, we arrive back to where I started with the issue about Kosovo, which is of minor geographics, but a big human problem. What we need is some idea of the structure of the world. Now I want to say to my philosopher friends here, who are in the majority. It's easy to sneer at the politicians. But the politicians' problem is that they are always heard dealing with the urgent, and that they do not always have a chance to deal with the important. Its no sense to keep condemning them, unless you can raise their sights to

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something that has a chance of happening. And this gets me to my
absolutely last point, I promise you Mr. President that this is the end; and
this last point is this:

That applies mostly to the United States but in this I think we are
forerunners of all of you. We are living through a change in human
consciousness, which we have not seen since the invention of printing. In
the medieval period, you had to learn from memory. And when you learn
from memory you need sacred texts because people will have to remember
more or less the same thing. For epic poems, and therefore human
consciousness was inevitably geared towards religious experience. Then
came printing, which expended the range of knowledge, which automatically
secularized mankind. But, the essence of the book is, first of all, it's
difficult, it takes effort to learn from a book. Secondly, you can't read every
book that's ever been written, so you need some sense to really relate
things to each other. And that, actually has the benefit of forcing you to
think about the future. Now we live in a period in which learning is easy.
You press a button. Style is unimportant. Style helps you get through a
book. You don't need style to read a computer printout. Young people
don't read much, I'm talking about the computer driven society, but we now
have available a range of knowledge that is absolutely unprecedented. But
they don't know what it means. They have no past, and they have, therefore,
great difficulty developing a future. I have a nephew who went to Princeton
University, who appeared in my house with a little goatee the other day, and
I said, "you know, you're beginning to look like Napolean the Third."
Would have been a crushing comment if he had ever heard of Napolean the
Third. He had never heard of him. Since then I've been trying ninetheenth
century and other figures, and none of them, most educated people don't

know them anymore. So, my point is, on one level it's funny, but on the
other hand here are people making decisions of huge consequence, who've
never heard of the most elementary struggles in Europe, take Kosovo,
between Turks and Western societies, the preludes to various wars. And
so, the unsolved problems to which I don't have any answer but which really
people must address is this: We don't have any problem accumulating
knowledge. We have an enormous problem understanding its significance.
And all of the issues that I have briefly sketched revolve around the question
of significance. All the tough political decisions are very close decisions.
And if you don't have a road map through them, the art of politics, of
political solution, is to understand what is a little problem and what is a big
problem, and not to deal with little problems as if they were big problems. If
we don't master that, then we're not going to master the age of globalization.
So Mr. President, thank you for letting me come here and to pay tribute to
one of the great thinkers of our period. Thank you very much.