Isaiah Berlin Memorial Lecture 2018: Stephen Kotkin

[Applause] Latvia abscissa Marcello simcha duniya kuriboh ivar do we have time for question that was it what else do I need to say in this splendid palace in this remarkable year hundredth anniversary centenary of independence of Latvia also centenary of the birth of Alexander Solzhenitsyn this week on Tuesday so it is a very high honor to be here and I thank you for the invitation it's difficult to speak after such a film for those who saw the film about his aya Berlin I don't speak as well as him I don't have as much to say as he does and I'm afraid I'm deeply afraid to disappoint this distinguished audience but no place to go at this point this is it since I know very little about Berlin I was very happy since I've never met Berlin and only know of him through his writings I was very pleased to learn so much about the film which I found to be excellent so this relieves me of the responsibility to pretend that I am an expert on Berlin which we have in this audience but not on the stage I'm gonna give a crazy lecture you have to remember of course I'm I'm American I'm from New York and so craziness is normal for a lecture for me so I'm going to give a crazy lecture about four points turning points in history and use these four points to try to make a general statement about the movement of history over that period of time and some indication for where it's going maybe after the lecture is finished I'm going to start with 1919 with a piece of Versailles everybody knows the Treaty of Versailles the treaty the main treaty that ended World War one of course there were other treaties which you know but this was the main one and nobody today has a really good word to say about the Treaty of Versailles it is held in low regard on one side there's a critique of the treaty which says that it was a punitive treaty excessively punitive they blamed only the Germans for the war and they imposed heavy reparation payments on the Germans this created instability and contributed to the rise of Hitler so what more needs to be said a terrible treaty there's another critique of the treaty which is less prominent but also important which was that the treaty was not punitive the Germans deserved the treaty and if the Germans had won the war they would also have imposed just such a treat as harsh as Versailles but in the opposite direction no they say the problem was that the British and the French lacked determination they lacked resolve to enforce the treaty the treaty was fine but they failed to enforce it and if they had enforced it everything would have come out okay so I would submit to you today that both arguments about the Treaty of Versailles that it was excessively punitive or that the British and the French lacked resolve to enforce the treaty that both arguments are irrelevant not wrong but irrelevant and I would say that because the treaty itself was an anomaly the treaty in 1919 was imposed on Germany without Russia Russia was not even invited to the treaty however that was the only time since Bismarck's unification of Germany 1870 71 the only time since Bismarck's unification of Germany where this was true where Russia was flat on its back and Germany was flat on its back at the same time no other point in history since Bismarck's unification of Germany can we say this and so it is a strange in fact anomalous year 1919 you could guess if you were alive in 1919 that either German power or Russian power would be restored in fact both German power and Russian power were restored in a single lifetime already in one generation and so the treaty was irrelevant imposed against Germany without Russia when they could do nothing about it and very soon they were able to do something about it and they didn't like it and they began to push to revise the treaty so this would be my argument that the treaty was irrelevant it was formed in a time period that would not last it was a fleeting moment in history 1919 in fact the British fully understood that this moment was a strange moment and might not last because it was the British before the Russians and before the Germans who were the most active revisionists of their own treaty in 1922 Lloyd George convened the meeting in Genoa Italy attempting to revise the Versailles Treaty by bringing Germany into a new treaty to stabilize the post-world War One order in fact Lloyd George even imagined that he might bring the Russians in - even though they were a communist regime Genoa in 1992 it failed because on the side of Genoa Russia now Soviet Russia and Germany did their own treaty called the Treaty of Rapallo however the British continued the entire period between the world wars still trying to revise the treaty their own Versailles Treaty in order to stabilize the interwar order obviously they failed and they were not able to stabilize the situation and we had World War two now infamously as you know Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938 agreed at the Munich pact to give away a large part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler without compensation known as the Munich pact 1938 once again nobody has a good word to say about the Munich pact or a good word to say about Chamberlain what could you possibly say about a man who appeased Hitler and gave away Czechoslovakia was he so stupid not to understand the alternative argument the alternative policy what the critics of Chamberlain were telling him was to do an alliance with Stalin and the Soviet Union against Hitler and hold Hitler back and go to war if necessary against Hitler with Stalin and Chamberlain wrote letters to his sister this is the Chamberlain that nobody has a good word for and Chamberlain wrote these letters and he said in the letters okay if I align with Stalin and we fight a war against Hitler and we win how do I get the Communists out of Central Europe so the fool Chamberlain put his finger on the dilemma which you and I call the Cold War and we also call it Soviet occupation of Latvia don't we so once again this is not an argument about how Chamberlain was a brilliant man or and we misunderstand him he made many mistakes he was not effective as a prime minister in foreign policy this is not an argument about how Hitler was not really a bad guy and Stalin was not really a bad guy they were evil they were mass murderers this is an argument about the irrelevance of the 1919 treaty and the search for a replacement order a different order already under Lloyd George and continuing throughout the interwar period the British policy didn't change after Hitler came to power it was the same policy that Lloyd George had been trying himself which was to incorporate Germany into the post-world War One order Stalin's policy also did not change you see the Soviets as I alluded to they made a deal with Germany on the side because Soviet policy in 1922 so-called Treaty of Rapallo because Soviet policy was precisely to prevent Germany from being incorporated into a new treaty which would stabilize the international order so the British wanted to pull Germany in in a new treaty to negotiate with Germany and the Soviets wanted to keep Germany out to prevent what Stalin called an all capitalist or all imperialist coalition because he felt if they all came together they could gang up on him this was Soviet policy see way before the rise of Hitler and it remained Soviet policy after Hitler's rise just as British policy remained the same both before and after Hitler so it's very important for us to understand this episode because to us we have these critiques punitive peace lack of resolve punitive peace lack of resolve let me briefly jump forward to 1991 yes 1991 and you know what Russia was flat on its back Russia was flat on its back and there was no peace treaty the same like Versailles in 1991 there was no single all-encompassing treaty that everybody signed but there were a series of agreements which imposed a new order on Russia as the defeated in the Cold War the defeated successor State to the Soviet Union yes that's right and what happened in 1991 and the years after well in exchange for the veto at the UN Security Council in exchange for the veto at the UN Security Council which is very valuable there are only five countries that have such a veto the Soviet Union ceased to exist but Russia was offered the veto as the main successor if they would assume all debt of the Soviet Union it was a deal and Russia agreed to the deal which meant that Ukraine didn't pay a percentage of proportion of the Soviet era debt they were absolved of the debt Kazakhstan didn't pay the Soviet era debt it all went on Russia because Russia inherit the Soviet Union veto at the UN Security Council there were other agreements that were signed and important for example the unification of Germany the unification of Germany was not automatic it had to be negotiated and as you recall the Soviet Union had 400,000 troops on German soil 600 650 thousand in Eastern Europe as a whole and 400,000 approximately in East Germany and so the Soviet Union agreed in the negotiations through the unification of Germany and there were other agreements some were not even agreements they were smaller than that known as memoranda which for those diplomats in the audience is not anywhere near the level of an agreement or a treaty for example there was the Budapest memorandum of December 1994 which we can all recall and that is when Ukraine Belarus and Kazakhstan agreed to relinquish their nuclear weapons in exchange for a paper guarantee of their sovereignty and territorial integrity and that agreement known as the Budapest memorandum was signed by Boris Yeltsin John Major and Bill Clinton has three nuclear powers along with the Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma well here we are we're living in this imposed settlement of 1991 and after when Russia was flat on its back and guess what not flat on its back anymore and guess what they don't like the settlement the series of agreements and memoranda they don't like them at all and so what are we gonna do are we gonna enforce the punitive piece like 1919 are we gonna have the resolve and determination to enforce this 1919 I'm sorry 1991 world order what do you think what happened when Russia seized Crimea by force violating the Budapest memorandum so I say this not because I approve of Russia's behavior Russia's behavior is a violation of international law and sanctions were imposed properly on Russia's behavior I say this because history is tricky business and you can learn big lessons from history even though it's not identical Versailles was a major treaty with many different partners signing it there is no such analogous treaty in 1991 I get that but let's remember in 1991 before the Soviet Union was dissolved and they were negotiating between Kravchenko Yeltsin right and the Belarusian leader they were negotiating and Boris Yeltsin said Crimea is Russia and Kravchenko just laugh at him forget it what could Yeltsin do he could do nothing he was unhappy this is the Boris Yeltsin who supported the independence of Latvia let us remember when he asked for Crimea back and they laughed at him he could do nothing about it well now they could do something about it and they did once again I don't condone violations of international law but this is the world that we live in now and we have to figure out how to live with Russian power because it collapses and it's there again and then it collapses and it's there again two times in the 20th century complete collapse and two times its back okay so I don't think the answer is we're gonna be able to enforce the 1991 settlement even if that seems to be the right idea and the reason I don't think we're gonna do that is because we're not doing it if you go to the United States and you say yes we need resolve we don't want to make the mistake of the British after the Versailles Treaty failing to enforce it well are you ready to send 100,000 or 200,000 American boys and girls to Ukraine to evict the Russian army and to remain there on Ukrainian territory to prevent the Russians from coming back and they look at you like what are you crazy we're not ready to do that nobody's gonna do that I say well then stop talking to me about your resolve because your resolve is only on paper it's not real so once again I'm not condoning any misbehavior in violation of international law I'm just looking at the situation with loud without sentimentality and it's very troubling okay that was the first one I said I had four I'll do another one and we'll see how this lecture goes maybe it will get better maybe not but there's always hope my next one is 1945 1945 what happened in 1945 as you know was the victory of the United States Great Britain and the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany and the Axis powers in East Asia it was the defeat of Japan predominantly by the United States with the Soviet Union as you know entering the war very late it was a gigantic year after a gigantic war the biggest war ever in recorded history you see the Soviet Union in had a problem it had a really big problem because there was a British dominated world and Russia the Russian Empire and the British were competing for influence in various places in inner Asia etc Europe as well but then two things happened to that world one was that Bismarck unification of Germany which created a new power on the continent which happened to be right at Russia's western border the other problem that Russia discovered was a second eruption in the British dominated world which was so-called meiji restoration in japan which was not a new country unlike the german story but was a much more dynamic country after the meiji restoration and japan rose as a great power in east asia so inside the british dominated world these two eruptions happened on each side of the russian empire flanking russian empire was a gigantic dynamic industrial germany and an industrial izing ambitious japan on the other side and yes you know your history and Russia lost the war to the Japanese in 1905 and the dynasty almost fell as a result of this lost war and then as you know because you are free people now again Russia lost the war to Germany in 1918 because of course there was the Treaty of brest-litovsk in March 1918 and the Germans won the war on the Eastern Front and so Russia lost two wars against Germany and Japan in a short period of time not long after in historical terms Bismarck unification of Germany and Meiji Restoration in Japan so this challenge was very difficult for the Soviet Union to meet to meet this challenge to be able to secure itself against Germany on one side and Japan on the other this period is known as Stalinism and that's what Stalinism was ultimately about it was about German power and Japanese power and figuring out how to survive that this is once again not a justification for anything that happened because the regime was monstrous but this was the challenge that it faced and amazingly incredibly really unbelievably the Stalin regime it rhymed unlike the First World War it defeated Germany in the Second World War and moreover the Germany had defeated in the Second World War was much bigger and much stronger and much better armed even than the first time around and the Soviet Union also participated in the defeat of Japan in that second war the Soviet Union didn't have to fight Japan and Germany at the same time for the most part because even though the democracies and the Soviet despotism formed an alliance the Axis powers didn't form a real military alliance fighting once again surprising that US UK and the Soviet Union could somehow be on the same side with those different regimes and the Germans and the Japanese with the same regime couldn't coordinate their militaries and instead as you know the Japanese went to war against the United States so why do I bring this all this history back up what is interesting about 1945 well what's interesting about 1945 is that the Soviet Union won this great battle this epic survival against German and Japanese power and then it proceeded to lose the peace it won the war and it lost the peace and that's why you are a free country today and that's why the Soviet troops had to go home not just from East Germany but also from Baltic States it took a long time for people to understand that they lost the peace after winning the war and some people still today don't understand it or they refuse to admit it so this episode post-1945 the problem for the Soviet Union was that they didn't have to fight Japan and Germany anymore you see the whole world changed Germany was defeated Japan was defeated fascism was eliminated militarily defeated on the battlefield decolonization happened markets and private property spread the United States remained engaged in world affairs unlike after the first world war so the whole world shifted it shifted from Great Depression to capitalist boom it shifted from fascism to rule of law and democracy it shifted from European imperialism to decolonization and it shifted from American disengagement to American global engagement the whole world over who would have predicted any of this would happen the United States was never inclined to be engaged across the whole world yes there were people who wanted after the second war to create a better peace what we call the liberal international order already in 1945 they articulated this vision meaning they wanted to use American power to stabilize the world so that we wouldn't have a third world war but this was not very popular among the American people that we would commit massive resources at our expense for this global crusade to do a better piece this time it was also not popular in the Republican Party which was one of the two main political parties in the United States in the 1940s just as it is today of course there was an assist there was somebody who helped the Americans in finding their resolve to remain globally engaged and his name was Joseph Stalin every time the Americans thought they might pull out they might go home they might save money Joseph Stalin behaved like Joseph Stalin and this scared the American public and it scared the Republican Party and it scared everybody and the Americans stayed engaged but it is not in the American DNA it may look like it but it's not in the American DNA to be globally engaged across the world that at such expense now of course there were many benefits to the international liberal order to the United States people now however are more conscious of the costs so I tell this story to show you that the period which we think of as semi-permanent or likely to continue is not likely continue and that was even before the current president assumed office in 2016 in Washington so let me make one more point about this when the tanks came up over the ridge the Soviet tanks when the German tanks came up over the ridge the Soviet tanks met the German tanks and destroyed them because the Soviet tanks were numerous and superior but when the American children's clothes came up over the ridge the Soviet children's clothes were less numerous and inferior quality and when the American supermarket came up over the ridge the Soviet supermarket was not as big not as full and not as high-quality and when the nylon stockings came over the ridge and when the chemical perms came over the ridge right and the children's toys came over the ridge and the jeans came over the ridge the Soviet side didn't have weapons that were as strong as high quality or as numerous you see because we changed the game on them they had the tanks they still have the tanks today we're shocked oh my god they have an army where did that come from all during the Cold War amazingly with an economy that was only one-third the size of the US economy the Soviets reached rough military parity military equivalents with the United States this is amazing that they did that the problem was that's not what they needed to do because the game had changed on and they lost the piece and they were forced to retreat now you can say that we're lucky they retreated and we were because maybe they could have been angry and maybe they could have been resentful and maybe they could have said well if we have to go home you're gonna blow up the way the Germans did when they retreated in 1944 in 1945 out of spite destroying everything and leaving nothing behind fortunately we didn't have that with the Soviet retreat so this episode the Versailles episode 1919 which has implications for 1991 and the 1945 episode I think has implications for the world we live in today and those implications are that we cannot take for granted that America has always been and is likely always to be globally engaged like this it took Joseph Stalin to consolidate those desires in the part of the American civil service that was interested to prevent a third world war the main reason the liberal international order was started in the mid 40s was to prevent the European empires from stabilizing themselves and continuing it wasn't to stop the Soviet Union that changed quickly enough okay so first the Americans thought they would invent a new world order to stop the European empires from reviving and then they got a new mission granted to them by Joseph Stalin now remember to conclude this second section who started the cold war Hitler started the cold war yes because Hitler invaded the Soviet Union and to defeat Hitler required that Stalin push all the way to Berlin so what did Chamberlain say in those letters to his sister how do I get if I do a military alliance with Stalin and defeat Hitler how do I remove the communists from Central Europe okay episode number 3 how am i doing timewise I'm okay I'm sorry there's no clock on the wall I can't sing I know I talked too long but I can't see how much too long I'm talking so I'm I hope to get to number four but may have to shorten it a little bit so that we have some questions of course or some objections to this crazy talk number three is 1979 some of you not very many but some of you will remember it because you were alive then I see this as a mostly young audience but nonetheless I see a few people who were alive in 1979 I was alive in 1979 what is it about 1979 well I'm probably not allowed to come down off the stage and look you in the eye because this is supposedly livestream can you imagine that somebody might be watching this it's shocking my mother is no longer alive she's the only one I could think of who would for sure be watching anyway I can see you better now I don't know if they can see me can they see me okay so at Princeton University I do this because I have to come out and see the students who are buying the clothes on online while I'm lecturing so I can check the prices the sales that they are buying the clothes with yes what else would you do with the laptop in the lecture hall yes since it's only seventy thousand dollars to get educated for one at Princeton you might as well buy clothes during the lecture okay where was I was I giving a lecture myself 1979 so in 1979 don't shout ping the first Chinese Communist leader to make a state visit to the United States invited by President Jimmy Carter this is a big turning point again in the world dong shall ping has grown up next to Japan and what happened in Japan was crushed in World War two completely crushed flattened rubble ashes atomic bombs and now Japan revived and second biggest economy in the world how did this happen what does the secret China is a mess Mao Cultural Revolution self-destruction the lunacy of the Maoist communist regime and Japan is a phoenix rise from the ashes so he comes to America dong shall ping and he decides yes enough with the Soviet model we are going to have a new partner a new partner we are going to get rid of the first wife Soviet Union and we're going to get a younger more dynamic more beautiful richer new wife the United States and he does it and Communist China in 1980 not long after dong shoppings visit is granted most favored nation status by the United States which means it has full access to the American domestic market see this is the secret the secret is if you can make something which the Americans want to buy and you get the right to sell it to the American market you grow rich this is called Japan and then South Korea and then Taiwan and so don't shell pink he looks over this he can see with his own eyes Japan South Korea and Taiwan they're right in the same neighborhood and so the Chinese begin a different approach which is an approach of manufacturing for export to the American domestic market the American middle class is the most powerful engine of any economic development we've ever seen in world history because the American middle class buys everything it doesn't have to shoes it has a hundred shoes it doesn't have one suit it has 20 suits it doesn't have one car it has two cars and three cars and four cars right you know you've been there it's crazy it's also crazy rich if you can sell it to them the middle class is so large and has so much disposable income available income to spend on consumption yes so lo and behold the middle class in China is created by the American middle class consumption the Chinese boom is related to don't shall pink cunning very cunning to change the model from the first wife the soviet wife to the second wife the american wife yeah you know i should pause for a second here it's not really good idea to divorce your wife and try to get a new one there was a man who was dying and he was in the hospital and he was a very guilty and his wife is with him and he wants to tell her something he wants to tell her but he has trouble telling her because it's a secret and he's kept it his whole life finally in the last minutes of his breath he tells his wife who's loyally standing by his bedside as he's dying he says - I must tell you something what she says he says I cheated on you and she says duh why do you think i poisoned you yeah don't shall pinky cheated on the soviet union but he did well he did very well his new wife didn't poison him this is what trump will do now so to finish this 1979 episode you need to jump back a little bit just for a moment I realized that you're having trouble the following all the jumping in the years because the lecture is crazy but stop for a second 1776 you know 1776 yes it is the birth of the United States well the United States is born and begins to grow it's very small it's very insignificant economy is microscopic nobody thinks it's going to be a great power someday it's absurd to imagine the future history of the United States in 1776 because let's face it the most important power in the world the richest country by far is what is China but what happens to China not long after America is born it is another one of these tricks of history America is born small and insignificant China is colossal and rich and not long after America's birth China begins to decline a lot of it is the predation from outside our friends the British Empire for example with the opium wars right we know this a lot of it is internal the Chinese experience not only external predation but also internal turmoil which is self caused and this is way before Mao who of course is the the king the emperor of self-destruction so for amazing coincidence the United States rises from 1776 to 1979 to be the greatest power in the history of the world and China from about 1800 to 1979 goes like this and actually you cannot imagine America rising to be the greatest power in the world without China going into the tank that's right because American power in the world is it may look like it's predominantly European connection but is largely about East Asia East Asia is crucial for American power and wealth the dominance of America and East Asia is absolute fundamental aspect of American power over all and if China had stayed the richest most powerful country as they were when America was born America could never risen to dominate the world the way it did but then something happened the Chinese tunnel ended and the Chinese began to rise again from 1979 and how did they rise they rose with the most powerful lever you could have American economic alliance the American middle class and so just as the Chinese decline made possible the American rise so the Chinese rise was made possible again by the American rise and it's intimately connected and it's very difficult to imagine one without the other now we must give credit to the Chinese it is astonishing what they've achieved you see because you can get permission to sell to the American market but the Americans they have to buy what you sell your products have to be good and they have to be superior in an international competition Romania could get access to American market and so what nothing against my friends in Romania right I'm from New York so I know what corruption looks like but Romania couldn't do what the Chinese could do so they got the access and it was geopolitically a turning point in world history and they succeeded because of their own dynamism and tripping Uriel ism and superior culture it was not a given that when dong shall ping obtained a communist country in America obtained full access to the American market in economic terms if you think that that's normal you don't know American culture of the Cold War very well so this episode the 1979 episode when that's our world now that's the world we live in today because for the first time in world history America and China are superpower at the same time never before because America is only from 1776 and China went like this for a long time not completely but predominantly of course once again the British the Japanese invasion there are many external reasons I'm not blaming the Chinese for what happened I'm not saying that the Chinese fell because they should have fallen they were pushed and then of course they did a lot to themselves in addition so we don't know how to live in this world where American power and Chinese power are strong simultaneously we don't know how to live in this world because it's the first time we're living in this world and we are struggling even to acknowledge this let alone to figure out how to do it okay I could say much more about this question about America and China today but I'll leave it at this point so I can get the fourth and last turning point and then as I said we can go to objections or questions okay my last one is 2016 2018 or you could pick 2010 and this is about fascism and communism fascism and communism what does the difference between fascism and communism communism is over that is the difference what do I mean well did you read your Orwell George Orwell Animal Farm yes of course we read that who could miss that great story from 1945 and what happens to Animal Farm at the end of that story you know the pigs the pigs are the Communists for some reason I don't know why that seems appropriate forgive me for that that was a self-indulgent comment and and shouldn't have been made maybe we can scratch that from the tape the pigs at the end of Animal Farm they convert the farm back to private property to Manor Farm the original farm before they revolutionized it before they nationalized the property yes they did and Orwell understood this in 1945 he didn't have to wait for 1989-1991 why wait he knew it then already in 1945 you see because communism doesn't work for the pigs and if you want to steal the property and you want to own the property legally after you stole it communism doesn't work for you you can steal it but you can't own it you can't legalize your ownership of the property and the wealth and the resources so what pig is gonna want to live like that for a long time for a short time maybe but for a long time no but with fascism hey no problem you can have authoritarianism and you can steal all the property you want and you can legally make it your own the private property it's perfect unlike communism you don't have to worry about get arrested black market stealing this and that it's legal it's private property in markets and so a fascism has a future that communism cannot clean communism doesn't have the kind of hope that I see for fascism going forward now of course many people and not only young people they see injustice they see inequality they go back to read Marx again they want to overcome the in justices and inequalities of capitalism I understand that we are living through a period in which communism or at least socialism could be popular with many people today who are sincerely concerned about the trends that they see I'm not denying that I'm only saying that for the pigs for the elites for the people in power it doesn't work and therefore it won't happen again they've learned their lesson they can do it much easily without all of that communism stuff and so in the world today we have a problem that problem as you know is sometimes called new authoritarianism right it's a different version of the kinds of problems that inspired desire Berlin to do all that work he did about freedom liberty and pluralism he was fighting the totalitarianism the fascism and the communism today we don't have fascism and we're not going to get communism again we have a different version of authoritarianism which we sometimes call fascism but that's because we write books about fascism and we try to make everything we do relevant to the world today so we know something about Mussolini we start going on television talk about Trump right that's the way we have fascism we have it on television with the idiot savant who talked about how just like Mussolini made a speech the Trump made a speech nevermind the stormtroopers the black shirts or the brown shirts are missing nevermind the glide Shelton hasn't happened and there has been no takeover of all the court systems never mind that all other parties have not been banned arrested and shot the leaders of the other political parties somehow we have fascism again no we don't we don't at all but we could and this is the problem and how could that happen well it could happen the same way it happened the first time militarization of politics through great power war yes what happens is authoritarian politics get militarized and violence becomes a normal political act when great powers go to war against each other and fight these total wars these gigantic colossal Wars like World War one where we started with that Versailles Treaty if that happens again then it's a very dangerous situation it's not just something like Orban and the resentment of Hungary losing the first war and the second war being on the wrong side of both wars and a roiling cauldron of resentment known as Hungary no it's much worse than what we have today in Hungary it's more like what we had in the interwar period after Versailles which is to say when peacetime politics are fully militarized and violent and stormtroopers are paramilitaries are marching through the streets I make no prediction that this is gonna happen I'm very bad at predicting the future if I was good at predicting the future I would work on Wall Street and not be invited necessarily to give such distinguished lectures here in Riga so this is no prediction this is merely a statement that if China and the u.s. go to war we could have actual fascism especially in China so here's what I'll close I'll close at this point I think I'm not so bad with time okay so one more minute if you'll give me come on up you are so you come on up and sit down because if I go on for five minutes while you're standing it would be unfair when I say one minute you can't count on it being only 60 seconds this is not like Japanese trains okay so where was I was I saying something no I agree with that but what was the train of thought all the same yes u.s. China and then the fascism yes so one of the most amazing things about communism is that there is no reform equilibrium what does this mean it means that there's no case where you began to reform and then you could just stop because everything was stable once you begin reform under communism you have two outcomes the reform continues and communism destroys itself or the reform is stopped and the hardliners and the reform and communism survives I don't make this in a philosophical statement I make this only as an empirical statement because we study history and this is what happens Hungary in 1956 Czechoslovakia in 1968 and of course Gorbachev in 1980s early 90s the more the reform goes forward the more communism begins to liquidate itself or as Brezhnev said in May 1968 at the Politburo during the events in Czechoslovakia before the Soviet crackdown reform Brezhnev said is counter-revolution which in our everyday vocabulary is to say reform is self liquidation counter-revolution and so this is the problem now for the Chinese regime isn't it you see they opened up the private sector and they allowed the private sector to flourish it was actually not the regime that did this it was the peasants who did this themselves in the 1970s during the Cultural Revolution because they didn't want to starve to death again and the peasants themselves recreated markets during the Cultural Revolution chaos and the Chinese communist regime only agreed grudgingly to accept this fait accompli by the peasants and those peasants became small business owners and medium business owners and they built up that Chinese economy but you see people who owned their own business and own their own property they're independent minded they have power including political power and so what does the Chinese communist regime doing today to the private sector squeezed it put it back you see it's become political trouble for the Chinese communist regime state-owned enterprises fine private ownership too much we need to bring it back and gain control over it unfortunately there is no political reform possible yet that we've ever seen a case of communism liberalizing itself successfully and surviving we've only seen three pathways I told you reform as auto liquidation reform stopped by hardliners and the third one is the nationalism appeal to the nationalism to survive we saw this in the Yugoslav case we see this in today's Russia and we could we are seeing it in China now and if that nationalism becomes intolerant unlike desire Berlin it becomes intolerant it becomes monastic again and it becomes violent like it was after great power war we're in very big trouble and on that happy note I thank you for your attention man I thank stealing that was terrific I will lose the privilege to us the first question but then we'll go to open the floor for when I further questions coming back to your first point on the Versailles situation and its comparison with current kind of Russia being imposed many treaties in the early 1990s it seems to me you seem to suggest that there are some kind of permanent objective security interests of those states that actually are more or less the same despite the change in regimes with Hitler coming to power in 1933 was Yeltsin going away in 2000 birthday's kind of objective interest remains the same which is basically the way of saying that expect trouble from Russia I mean on the following the German example it would be lovely if Russia were to achieve what Germany has achieved since World War two we would live in a much better world if Germany and Russia looked the same but they looked the same because Russia looked like Germany we didn't achieve this yet and I'm skeptical that history is moving in that direction it's possible anything is possible who would have predicted the German trajectory since 1945 it's astonishing Oh in retrospect it looks obvious that this would happen but at the time looking forward it didn't look like that to most people and it was a struggle and the Germans deserve enormous credit for their amazing achievements post-world War two Russia is not moving in this direction in fact I think I'm worried about Germany can you imagine a world today if Germany looked like Russia the probability of Russia looking like Germany is lower in my head than the probability of Germany looking like Russia so I'm very afraid of this one very good development is the Green Party in Germany is very important so I am NOT the political person I don't belong to any political party I participate as a citizen I pay my taxes I vote because the the right to vote is very dear and many people sacrificed in Wars and in protests to have this right to vote so I honor that civic obligation and I always vote but I don't belong to a political party I give a lot of credit to the center-right and Angela Merkel's party in Germany it's an amazing achievement once again but we need also a strong center-left party and the disintegration of the Social Democratic Party in Germany is very well advanced but the Greens have done a remarkable job and filled that enormous space on the center-left those greens if you remember them from the beginning when they first started were very different from where they are now the kind of mature and excellent leadership that they have now and their ability to hold the center-left in germany is a great development and I'm I'm not the member of the Green Party and I don't really always sympathise with what they do but I love them all the same because I need them to stay keep Germany stable I need a center-right and a center-left in every big and important democracy to keep them stable I need it in the United States I need it in Germany now if Russia is going to change and move and become more like Germany I think this would be a positive development in the first instance for the Russian people because the Russian people are the biggest victims of the current Russian regime in my opinion and so it would be great if this would happen especially for Russians but I don't see this development right now once again I didn't see 1919 what happened after 1919 I didn't see what happened after 1945 I didn't see what happened after 1979 if I was alive I predict none of this history is surprising again and again and again so we have to be very careful to take the present and string it all the way forward as if it's obvious that the president will continue forever so Russia has many possibilities also thanks ok we could proceed the Q&A session yeah the gentleman over here please introduce yourself thank you very much for your fascinating talk I just wanted to ask you a question about the European Union and what's going on now in Europe that is the the hope for integration proceeding further or disintegration proceeding more intensively as we will see now with brexit whether there is a place for some kind of an analysis within your perspective that you provided so far thank you another easy question thank you for that excellent question so I'm not an expert on European Union and so this will be a mature commentary but not unlike what some of what you heard before but even more a mature than what you heard before so the European Union is very young in historical terms it's only like a blip it's like an infant a new baby and we cannot tell where it's going it's very difficult to understand where it's going from the perspective of today we don't have enough the development enough history there to have a firmer grasp so anything is possible the idea that they would get deeper integration is not on the cards right now there is no momentum in this direction the idea that they will disintegrate was predicted with the brexit vote but we see it didn't happen it was predicted with the trouble over the debt in Greece and it didn't happen so there's more resilience in the European Union than many people predicted not everybody predicted disintegration but many did so it looks like it will struggle and just survive day by day what they used to call in hops pork times muddle through it doesn't look good but we're still here today and if we're still here tomorrow and the day after tomorrow we will muddle through the muddle through looks like a joke but it can be a very effective strategy on the part of the Europeans the problem for Europe is there's no pathway to the deeper Union and without the deeper Union the current configuration of institutions malfunction and so you're kind of stuck being unable to fix what you have but not wanting to lose it let us not underestimate the resolve to keep the European Union remember when I talked about the credit that we owe to Stalin for America staying engaged globally after World War two that Stalin's evil regime and his actions in Europe in Berlin in the North Korea green-lighting the invasion by the North Koreans of the South Korea and many other examples that you know well the more Stalin was like Stalin the more America became the global protector that we know so we can be thankful in a crazy way for Vladimir Putin Vladimir Putin is the glue of the European Union Russia conducts sabotage and subversive activities in European Union countries this is a fact I don't have to explain to this audience you understand that much better than anybody coming from the United States could possibly tell you at the same time with Russia threat as it's usually referred to is enormous ly helpful in keeping a unified Europe support for Europe and muddling through for the left the Russian threat is what we call manna from heaven if you know the Bible for the right the Solidarity comes from immigration the immigrants the threat of immigration so the threat of immigration from Africa and the Middle East from the black and the brown people helps the Solidarity from the right the threat from Russia helps the Solidarity from the left not completely it doesn't line up perfectly but lines up mostly like this those two external threats are crucial for European solidarity in the current moment to model through if you solve the Russia problem and you solve the immigration problem you are left to confront the European Union problem okay thanks we have two questions on this side let's take them together Lolita on dirt players sitting here an ex politician thank you so much for your fascinating lecture and I believe that in this audience your conclusion that communism is dead forever is very appealing however I would like to ask you about different versions of communism for instance you were mentioning the example of Hungary several times and we know that Hungary had a version of communism which is referred to as goulash communism often and this is being this form of communism is being used as an explanation for the weakness of civil society and the political opposition in Hungary nowadays would you like to discuss and comment on this thank you okay let's take another one because we are running short of time so yes my name is I'm a journalist I want to ask first of all about wash how to get to Astrid to obey the international treaties like we cover now the situation of the CFA's oh and the second one is also you specified the board were United States and China is misleading powers having this world world the washer fits in is it's a regional superpower is this a regional power so Hungary and Russia okay should I answer now wait let me just look at the watch again because you've seen already my trouble with managing my answers let's start with the Russian and go to the Hungary second if that's okay so Russia is becoming a colony of China those are the facts Russia has no answer for Chinese power Chinese dominance across Eurasia is happening with Russian complicity it's astonishing that Russia is doing this it's causing a lot of worry anxiety inside the Russian state we don't know at the very top but we know at the middle and the lower levels that they're afraid of China and they're afraid of what's happening because Russia failed to build a new Eurasia but China is building a new Eurasia we call this China is eating Russia's lunch if Russia collapses many people believe I don't know why that Russia will collapse but not only collapse disappear if Russia collapses and disappears you will have China on the border with Hungary yes so let's go to Hungary now yeah that's what the world looks like unfortunately it's not the way we want it to be Hungary so Hungary had a goulash communism and the civil society is weak and Poland had the goulash communism and the civil society is strong and hunger and Ukraine had no goulash except in the western region and civil society is strong so I don't see causal connection between the configuration of the communism and the post communism it's a longer term problem so Hungary very unfortunate they got the very bad settlement out of World War two a large number of Hungarian ethnic people ethnic Hungarians were located outside the border of Hungary after World War two you know they were in Serbia they were in Ukraine they were in Czechoslovakia and especially in Romania this is not good soil to build a democratic polity the resentment the roiling resentment the irredentism and the Hungarian past has come back to haunt them on this fertile soil for xenophobia and authoritarianism Hungary is not the future of Europe Hungary is an outlier if you look at Poland it's very different the society is much stronger in Poland than in Hungary and in addition Poland was not the loser in World War two it was a partial a partial winner it gained a lot of German territory in World War two which is something you cannot say about the Hungarians if you think about the EU policy we blame them because they were weak with Hungary and they didn't react and punish Autobahn when he began his authoritarian trajectory and instead they waited till Poland and they made a stand in Poland as if they were asleep at the wheel and failed to stop the Hungarian trajectory early enough this could be true but I would submit to you that it's very difficult to recuperate Hungary but Poland is redeemable from authoritarianism for deep structural and historical reasons and if we can hold the line and it's only Hungary this will be a significant achievement and I hope that the EU can rise to this challenge and the Polish society as we're seeing can also rise to this challenge okay and we have time for one short question okay Mike the gentlemen in the first row hello my name's Mike Collier thank you for a really interesting lecture first I just wanted to reassure you that you don't need to scrub the joke about communist pigs from the tape because all Wells publisher Victor Gollancz initially refused to publish the book because he thought it might offend Stalin so but I was very struck by your description of the way that the American middle class has fueled the with its consumption the rise of Chinese economy and the Chinese middle class in particular I wanted to ask what you think happens as the knock-on effect once we get there much predicted rise of the Chinese middle class because it seems from what you were saying towards the end of your talk that that would be in tension with the Communist Party so will it be that they will be clamped down or that they look to other markets to serve the same role that America served for them oh yeah that's it that's the whole question right there that's the whole game Hungary is important for Hungarians and for their neighbors but that China question you just asked is the future of the world that we live in today the Chinese communist regime understands that it needs a private sector because that's how they grew rich but the Chinese communist regime is afraid of the private sector because that's how the communist regime could be overthrown and so there you are that's a contradiction that cannot be fixed open a little more middle class too much closed it again a little more closing so we're gonna see this dynamic going forward repression of the middle class followed by desire to have middle-class economic dynamism because otherwise the economy doesn't grow and no creation of jobs and the regime could be overthrown for that reason it could be overthrown or dissolve both because middle class gets too strong and because middle class gets too weak that's called dilemma of communism isn't it but if the Chinese Communists can figure out how to survive the continued growth of the Chinese middle class then they can own the world because the Chinese middle class is bigger than the American middle class ever was and it's the lever it's the power to shape and to have all the countries be your allies to have other countries give you the technology to have other countries choose you against other partners because they can grow rich if they can get access to your middle class so far we see this again and again and again China is the number one trading partner of everybody maybe not of Latvia okay but all throughout East Asia and through big parts of Africa and now in Germany which is oriented towards the Chinese economy yes so I am watching very closely that contradiction that you pinpointed and if the Chinese can figure this out keep the communist regime because the communist regime wants to survive no matter what while also growing the middle class Chinese power will expand geometrically going forward but if they cannot resolve this contradiction the China will flame out and once again there will be no competition for the American story thank you okay thank you very much Steven you really made our evening so and thank you all for coming once again I want to express our thanks in on the behalf of the dots foundation the organization responsible for the organization of the you say Berlin day many thanks to our support of the US Embassy in Riga the European Commission representation in Latvia and the Riga City Council thank you very much and a good evening [Music]

Channel: Fonds DOTS

Views: 39,316

Rating: 4.8502994 out of 5

Keywords: isaiah berlin, jesaja berlins, jesajas berlina piemiņas lekcija, stephen kotkin, stīvens kotkins, philosophy, world politics, world power, isaiah berlin day in riga, jesajas berlina diena riga, history, lecture, history lecture, international relations, vēsture, filozfija, lekcija, pasaules politika

Id: MCusFCg-z_0

Length: 82min 46sec (4966 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 14 2018