Stephen Kotkin: Sphere of Influence II

[Music] good evening and welcome to the Institute on this snowy April evening it's a distinct honor and pleasure to be able to introduce Professor Steven Kotkin for his second in a series of three lectures professor Kotkin was introduced to you at his first lecture by my colleague and director of the Institute Shalini Rand era and he will also give his third lecture exactly at the same time next week on Wednesday this was supposed to be introduced by my colleague and friend even crust FC have the even part of the crust left even Bovada also permanent fellow here and we will follow the same routine as last time for those of you who were here Professor Kotkin will speak tonight on the issue of what if anything is the difference between fascism and communism a fascinating topic he is known to you as a great expert on on Russia on history on international affairs he's also associated with the Hoover Institution at Stanford and after publishing the first volume on Stalin he is here preparing the publication of the second volume which I guess will come out in the fall so professor Carr can please thank you thank you once again for the honor of the invitation to come to the Institute and give these lectures I commend all of you for being here given that this is after all the second lecture and the weather shows that we are in an intellectual winter which will be part of the theme of the lecture so the weather is entirely appropriate so Boris Yeltsin was at a press conference and a journalist that raised his hand called on him and asked him Boris Yeltsin Boris Nikolayevich can you sum up the situation in Russia in one word he said good Carter show the journalist asked for a follow-up question he said Boris Nikolayevich can you sum up the situation in Russia in two words not good Nakara show as you can see I left a lot of time for questions again that's it I failed to capture all the people who fled the country prior to the first lecture as you can see crust if is still at large but in case we need to take hostages I brought the duct tape so I'll just warn you now what is the difference between communism and fascism it's pretty simple communism is over that's the difference that will be what I'll try to prove in the lecture today have from the write a story of totalitarianism where communism and fascism are essentially equivalents we have from the left a story of communism as anti-fascism but instead of these mythologies there is a different story there's a story of in liberalism self enrichment and discovery that's the story I'm going to lay out for you I'll do it in four parts part one will be about certain mythologies that we hold part two I'll tell an alternative story part three I'll talk about China and part four I'll get to back to the theme of liberalism and communism being over but fascism not being over so here we have 1989 it is the core mythology of those who live through those events and of many Institute's including this one and of almost the entire intellectual class it's a wonderful story dissidents resistance overthrow revolution and of course Velvet Revolution and we had all those debates and you remember them because maybe you participated in them about how velvety it all was which was more velvet which was more heroic which strategy was the most brilliant there were awards there was no small degree of self-congratulation and where are we now where are we now if all of that was so important so causal so salient why doesn't it show its importance now why isn't it salient now why aren't dissidents so powerful now why is it resistance so powerful now why can't we overthrow things with intellectuals now the answer is because all of that is a myth to a very significant extent you remember John on one Square in China also in 1989 and there were a million people in China on one square not to mention all the other cities and here we are today we are twenty seven and a half years later and that regime is still there where the Chinese protesters less courageous where Chinese dissidents less courageous I don't think so I think they were equally as courageous as the dissidents here any sooner absolutely I think their protests were equally sincere I think their intentions were equally sincere but they could not overthrow that regime and so that's what we have to come to grips with we have to come to grips with where we are today in Europe and we have to come to grips with a story with a history that encompasses not just Poland or Hungary or Czechoslovakia but also encompasses East Asia because if the story doesn't work for East Asia then maybe it doesn't work at all the Czechoslovak came out into the streets in November 1989 and what this is a revolution November 1989 they hit the streets and somehow it was a revolution the Hungarian communists had to help form the other side of the roundtable do you think if the Polish communist government in 1988 had not had unpayable debts and foreign currency they would have organized that roundtable and invited solidarity to that process I don't think so I think there are larger structural factors and yes geopolitics here we have the Soviet collapse and the East European Revolution how could be that we have two different stories so diametrically opposite one is a collapse and the other is a revolution and the answer is because we there are stories that are dear to our hearts some of us participated in them directly but these stories don't work as explanation what happened was the elite surrendered they lost their will they gave it up the geopolitics didn't work anymore and Eastern Europe embarked on a long slow march from periphery to periphery and that's where we are there is a big challenge here an intellectual challenge beyond just 1989 you read the history and you're thinking how could it be in 1989 the people brought down communism themselves with their bare hands their agency was nearly a hundred percent but then in the 1940s they were not agents they were victims they didn't have any agency they were invaded the Nazis on the one side the Soviet communists on the other they lived in the blood lands between those who had agency how could it be better people has little to no agency in the 1940s and all of a sudden total agency in the 1980s this is a trick it's a trick it's a political trick that is being perpetrated upon us all it didn't happen that way as you know there was plenty of agency in the 1940s anyone who's familiar with the work of my colleague John gross can tell you all about it and the agency in the 1980s needs to be put in the context of the structural factors pema geopolitics yes there is a great story it's a wonderful story like I said and these are the best people who doesn't think that a Damini is an incredible person breathtaking he might be the most amazing person I've ever met the courage the long history of courage the savvy the Praxis he taught in my class with young girls at Princeton University and I got a chance to see it firsthand there can be no doubt what kind of person Adam Michnik and others alongside him are but that's not an explanation okay so what might be the explanation where should we go to deliver a context to deliver the structural factors to put the agency in some type of story that makes sense both for Europe and for Asia you'll remember from the first lecture that I made several points first the West won the Cold War because it was a sphere of influence it was an active proactive sphere of influence that wanted to enforce itself into the face of the second world of communism every day that would the strategy and that's how the Cold War was one second I argued that the West was not ready for its success the success was astronomical beyond anyone's wildest dreams and now somehow were in a position of losing the post Cold War when winning the Cold War was immensely harder third I argued that the dreaded return of geopolitics the desire to escape from geopolitics is a mistake the right sees a benign global us hegemony purer and above geopolitics and the left sees a pooled sovereignty multinational organizations the supposed counterpoint to nasty geopolitics but in fact as I argued without leadership there is no international system the international system is only what the most powerful country will or won't do we have a history rich with the absence of an international system and we could be on the verge of revisiting that history geopolitics is the foundation it's the driver it's the foundation and driver for a lot of misery and it's also the foundation and driver for the amazing story that's Europe today and the quality of life that we all cherish ok now in the third lecture I'll take you up deal with the present day phenomenon the third lecture is entitled the chip-on-the-shoulder as you know it's an idiom in English indicating resentment you feel grievances you feel wronged you carry what's called a chip an invisible chip on your shoulder then these grievances smolder and I'll talk about those grievances that chip on the shoulder in terms of the international system we talked about populism within individual countries but I'm going to talk about it as part of the international system or the undoing of the international system today in the second lecture we're going to take a quick excursion back into recent history setting up this chip-on-the-shoulder third lecture okay so we're still in part two the alternative story I just need a time check here because I'm not good with stopping on time I think I'm going to actually go all the way and remove the jackets if that's okay thank you now that we're intimate this being the second lecture I think we'll give it a shot the informality so 55 million people died in World War two 55 million the number from World War one was maybe a third of that less than a third and it was horrific 55 million is an absolutely impossible thing to understand we have things like Syria today absolutely horrific but of course in the context of world war two I could talk about how many people died in specific battles greater just one battle greater than the number of dive in Syria today ironically was the winners who lost the most people China lost between 10 and 13 million they were on the winning side and the Soviets as you know the estimates are about 27 million so together between China and the Soviet Union you have almost 40 million of the 55 million well we don't need to revisit the details of that story you know them I just want to point out that that's the world we live in today we live in the post-world War two order it's the world that's still with us let me try to prove that there was a colossal geopolitical shift in the 1940s this colossal geopolitical shift in the 1940s was unforeseen what we call capitalism what we call capitalism went from fascist militarism it went from depression and unemployment it went from colonies around the world imperialism rapacious colonialism it went from all of that to constitutional orders where they had been fascism booming market economies where the middle class acquired housing the working-class acquired housing my father worked in an embroidery Factory and he bought a house in the post-world War two period there was freedom there was economic dynamism middle-class boom there was decolonization the whole world shifted and above all there was an American government and an American society populist committed to the post-world war two order now you may think that I have nostalgia but I am now as it were putting on what they call the rose-colored glasses to look at this but the shift was phenomenal in the 1950s Germany West Germany grew at more than 10% a year GDP for years on end Japan had a phenomenal boom there was no repeat of the Great Depression even though that's what everyone predicted Stalin thought it would happen again Truman thought it would happen again instead there was this middle-class boom this middle-class economic boom produced the people in this room including myself there was freedom real freedom the kind of freedom that was underwritten by constitutional order rule of law independent judiciaries competence and impartial civil service functioning Parliament's and the decolonization process wasn't pretty it was reluctant but it happened it happened in many ways it could have been better and should have been better what had happened I could go on with the details of this shift I could talk to you about what happened in Japan coming back from the ashes to become the second largest economy in the world can you believe that that's just astonishing the West German story we know well some of us lived it some of us observed it but the Japanese story is equally breathtaking and you can say that US leadership in the international system was not always benign and I would be the first to agree but there's a big difference between leadership that you can criticize because of his mistakes and self-interest and the absence of leadership leadership is something that other countries don't like to do they pass the buck because it's very costly leadership of the international system very costly the British have a geostrategy a grand strategy of lowest cost possible get others to fight your wars yeah they're calling now on the phone the US was different we can all go through the reasons why I'm just saying there was a shift but one place in the world didn't shift one place in the world did not shift at all it was destroyed in the war it lost about a third of its wealth and it rebuilt itself in the inner war style the Soviet Union reconstituted itself which is another amazing story in the Stalinist fashion with heavy industry you know when Stalin died Khrushchev took over there were 1.5 socks per person in the Soviet economy 1.5 sucks like you I have two feet and I need to sucks so 1.5 per capita wasn't going to work especially if anybody had three or four socks they were women with no husbands who wanted to have children anyway it's a story that's heart-rendering but it's a story of reconstitution of the soviet system the world d colonizes the soviet union acquires the satellite states its outer empire has or will called it fascism is defeated the stormtroopers are defeated communism keeps its KGB it's coercive mechanisms the world moves to dynamic market economies communism rebates doubles down on the planned economy and I could go on but this gigantic geopolitical shift one country didn't shift because it felt it won the war which was true and that's why they have the UN veto because they earned it in the Security Council they won that war but there's a tragic dimension to winning the war because it ratified the system it ratified Stalin's rule and when the rest of the world went in what we call the West the direction of the West communism didn't and now communism is in a geopolitical competition with this West and it's not really a fair competition let's think about this for a second you know sometimes when you play football and it's a group of people you may not know or you know only a little bit and the teams are not formed yet and you pick two captains and then the captains each get to choose their squad from the players and so the United States is okay let's start I'll take Japan so if it uses all right I'll take Romania and then the United States is okay I'll take Britain so uses okay I'll take Bulgaria and then the United States is all right I'll take France so this is okay that's good I get Hungary and then it goes all the way West Germany East Germany and these are the two sides now you tell me thinking about that even prospectively rather than retrospectively what type of competition that's going to be not much of a competition if the side that's the West understands what it is has willpower understands it's a sphere of influence and pushes itself in the face of what was called the second world or communism and that's exactly what happened communism was crushed in a daily life competition it was absolutely crushed you know David Riesman some of you will be familiar with lonely crowd David respond in 1951 he wrote a satire called quote the nylon war nylons are stockings that women wear and he said that the Americans were going to bomb the Soviet Union not with explosives but with consumer goods in operation abundance they were going to drop nylon hose and radios and wristwatches and toasters and sewing machines and refrigerators and jeeps and the Russian people the Soviet people here oh we're going to see all of this and then we're going to capitulate it was a satire 19:51 well guess what that's what happened only we didn't drop it we just built it up and we showed it to them and they could see it they could see it in the proverbial between they could see it in the shop window they couldn't have it but they could see it and on it went chemical perms from beauty parlors children's clothes and children's toys you could go on and you could go on bananas oranges it was a daily life competition and it seeped and it seeped on purpose behind that iron curtain into the second world because we pushed it in their face and because they were susceptible the Western sphere of influence invaded the Soviet bloc invaded it with consumer goods invaded it with freedom invaded it with who we are sometimes we lost our way we lost our well sometimes we forgot who we were and there were moments as I was talking about in the first lecture of the 1970s the Vietnam War the oil shock Nixon and Watergate when many people thought the Soviets were the dynamic side and that the West was collapsing consider for a second East Germany consider East Germany and of course they had as it was called imperialist hate on their television every night as those of you who grew up in East Germany will know they could watch the West German television imperialist hate as they called it let's think about that the East German elite they wore Western suits they wore Western shoes they had Western toys for their children the head Western perfume for their wives and mistresses already produced by wage slavery in the capitalist world the political mafia all over the globe drives a Mercedes the East Germans could not quite bring themselves so they imported Volvo's and the compound where the elites lived was called what it was called Volvo gran because that was their car of choice their entire life their entire existence the East German nomenklatura was completely suffused by Western products by Western luxury goods by not even luxury goods by simple goods and this was a symbol of their status that's how they differentiated themselves now you ask yourself how could it be that that side could allow could allow such complete and total suffusion of the Western sphere of influence so that it marked their status behind the Iron Curtain that's right it was a really big problem you see because what was that world that world was the antidote to capitalism you see there was no reason for East Germany because there was already West Germany unless East Germany was superior to Western the whole point of the Eastern Bloc was that it would be superior to capitalism it would be more abundant more free more whatever you wanted to measure otherwise it had no reason to exist the problem was it wasn't superior it measured itself based on the Western fear of influence I mean we couldn't have rigged the game any better the western side communism was susceptible to the Western sphere of influence and the West was more or less resolute and when we had riots in the streets it looked like weakness but no it was our society being more open and having corrective mechanisms and when we had people on TV called useful idiots talking about how the Eastern Bloc was better and it was on our TV and then it went to theirs and they said look it's from Western TV it looked like our weakness but of course obviously it was our strength because we were not afraid of alternative points of view and self-criticism because we are a free society there's power and freedom if you know if you understand that this is also very banal and yet somehow we forgot about this with stories of dissidents and round tables the KGB absolutely crushed the dissident movement that's what the KGB documents show from the 1980s and that's what the dissidents own stories from the 1980s show crush solidarity drove it on the ground you can say well still they were powerful on the ground they were underground and thousands were in jail I got to tell you communism was good at repression that was one of the things that was good at it wasn't good at the real game the game wasn't tanks coming up over the ridge and the course salient the game was nylons and they had no answer for that they had the answer for the German tanks the Soviet tanks was superior to the German tanks Guderian wrote back in 43 Guderian who invented the blitzkrieg with his insubordination in France when he raised for the channel after the die the crazy crossing through the Ardennes Forest of all those tanks he raised to the channel against orders and he cut the French often the biggest encirclement imaginable and this was blitzkrieg because you eliminated the ability of the other side to fight and it hadn't been in the plan it happened because of his daring and his insubordination he went against orders yeah the blue-screen didn't work because the soviet tanks not only did the soviets have space not only did they have many other factors but they were good at tanks they were good at all the military stuff if the Cold War was about a military competition the Soviets were good at that they reached parity and a lot of their weapons didn't Jam didn't jam in the jungles didn't jam in the deserts they were superior in difficult environments yeah but the daily life competition no answer you remember to see with Dustin Hoffman Soviet audience eath black audience remembers it too why because Dustin Hoffman dressed up in the crazy outfit remember Dustin Hoffman is in an apartment and he walks from one room to another room and then he goes into another room and then another room and then another room and the cameras following in another room in the Soviet audience the East Bloc they're trying to count the rooms could somebody live like that is that what the West is like and then he goes out on the street and he's just walking down the street and he passes a grocery shop and you know what it shows it shows gigantic piles of citrus fruits and vegetables right there and he just walks by as if he doesn't even need it he doesn't have enough votes he doesn't have a little sack to stuff the sack the way they did in the East Bloc because that's just life could they live like that in the West it was hard to say because they weren't allowed to travel for the most part only the Communists were allowed to trap Gorbachev drove in the 60s he drove he was allowed to drive to Italy in France with his wife in a beat-up Soviet car and he saw the abundance and he saw the freedom he saw the civic activism he saw the West and many saw the Prague Spring after the tanks had destroyed it yeah it was a sphere of influence and they were susceptible now you're going to say to me I know what you're going to say you're going to say eh you're going on too long be all this is obvious see where is it going where is this crazy lecture about fascism and communism going the answer is they lost but so what so what they lost so what they were not collapsing the dissidents were in prison or psychiatric hospitals remember Amnesty International I remember I was for a while a chapter headed Berkeley for Amnesty International University California Berkeley yeah they lost but so what just because you lose doesn't mean you have to capitulate but they did capitulate they capitulated not on purpose they capitulated because they wanted to revive themselves they wanted to compete better they wanted to do better in that geopolitical competition so they embarked on reform socialists reform socialism with a human face communist reform all those words you know well and of course reform under communism is auto liquidation we saw it in 56 we saw it in 68 you give a little bit of freedom they want all the freedom you give a little bit of market they want all the market you say ok you can form political groups one of foreign parties want to break the communist Banali there is no equilibrium of reformed communism there is no place where you go and you get from Stalinist communism to stable socialism with the human face it's Auto liquidation not because only inherently within communism that possibility is there it's because they're in a geopolitical context they live in the Western world they live under Western oil prices they live under everything Western Western financial system and I could go on and so Gorbachev attempts the revival it's not an attempt to do the market to do capitalism and a multi-party system not at all it's an attempt as you know to revive the socialist system the one-party but more dynamic the control society but was more dynamism the controlled economy but with more dynamism even guide our had no idea what a market economy was let alone Gorbachev if you read guide our forward rather than backward it's about Hungarian Goulash communism that's what his papers are about about Yugoslavia and about all sorts of stuff except for the market and freedom that's not what it's about guide our it was Gorbachev who introduced competitive elections there was no imperative to do so he introduced competitive elections he forced it through the Politburo he forced it on his own system it was Gorbachev who dismantled the Communist Party machine from the inside already in 1988 why because he feared that there would be a revanche against him like Khrushchev that they would use the Communist Party machine the Conservatives the anti reformists and they would take him down and end reform that was his fear so he sabotage them he took their mechanisms away but you see the Communist Party was the key to the Soviet system not being a federation in practice the Soviet state was a Federation of voluntary Federation with the right to secede according to the Constitution there was an Estonia there was a Ukraine they had state borders they had state institutions they had federal powers but all of that was negated by the centralism of the Communist Party because the party wasn't federal it was a pyramid and the Communist Party of Ukraine had the same power as a village or provincial Communist Party in Russia but once you eliminate the Communist Party's control mechanisms you create you establish the actual state Federation and the lithuanian parliament begins to pass laws that contradict the Soviet Constitution and there's no communist party machines to stop it it has been deliberately sabotaged by Gorbachev to understand why the Soviet Union fell you have to have understood that the Federation was real that they were real states inside the Federation and only the Communist machine negated the Federation in practice and once you remove the communist machine you've got your Federation and he did that he did that then of course there was the opportunism the tremendous opportunism once the system gets unhinged there is desertion of the system for two reasons first you have you can stay in power the Soviet Union is imploding but hey there's Ukraine I wasn't really much of Ukrainian nationalists I ran the military-industrial complex in the Ukraine for the Soviet Union but the Soviet Union is unhinged in collapsing all of a sudden I'm a ukrainian patriot and i can stay in power because i can become the head of ukraine or the head of kazakhstan or the head of whatever it might be moreover all this property that belongs to the state who is a state who is the state I hereby give myself this factory signed myself god that was easy we have a ridiculous notion that Anatoly too buys privatized the former Soviet they privatized it themselves he tried to legalize a process that was deeply under way you see because communism is dead you can't have as much property and self enrichment on the communism you know they limited the size of your dachi and if you exceeded the size of your dachi they came and they forced you to dismantle it oh they dismantled it yourself you exceeded it by 10 square meters and they showed up with tools and they knock that part down and they gave you a party reprimand and if you paid a bribe to get around these rules that was a bribe you had to pay to get around the rules but you see if you take away communism there are no limits you just have it all forget about that pathetic Volgograd a Volvo gras in East Germany how about not just driving a Volvo how about owning the streets and the airport and you name it I hereby give the airport to myself sign to myself how about that that process meant who is going to go to the wall to defend the system who in their right mind is try to save the system you'll remember from 1984 actually from Animal Farm from Orwell's Animal Farm you'll remember at the end of the farm at the end of the not novella the pigs the pigs are the Communists the pigs returned the farm to mattify all that animal farm nonsense is over who who who had this crazy idea so you know communism was real there was something to it there was a leveling aspect there was a working class aspect there were a lot of things about communism that were significant but it's gone now because you can have your cake and eat it too you can have your property it's not that hard to run an illiberal market-oriented kleptocracy and so communism is dead but fascism is not and the mechanism was the Western sphere of influence the geopolitics and Gorbachev ill-fated well-intentioned thank God he did it attempt to reform the system now there are many other things I could talk about talk about the wall talk about Poland solidarity good talk in detail I'm in print on all of these issues I'd be happy to talk about I could talk about the myth of the Soviet failure to copy China the Soviets started with agriculture there was massive agricultural reform before Gorbachev was general secretary when he was the central committee secretary responsible for agriculture already in the early eighties it failed I could talk about how the USSR was not crushed by the military-industrial complex no guess who produced the consumer goods in the Soviet Union who produced every fridge Raiders the military-industrial complex did we have the secretariat of the military-industrial complex the files of the secretariat of the military-industrial complex of the soviet union in the post-world war ii period at the Hoover Institution at Stanford the internal assessments of star wars we have those documents those are like cold war trophies and you can read and see that the military-industrial complex was the linchpin of the consumer economy anyway I'm not going to talk about that because I don't have time I want to go to three a little bit about China and then I want to conclude I think we're about ten minutes left we have a story about China and the story about the Soviet Union as I said doesn't work Eastern Europe story doesn't work unless the China story is in there and we have this China story which is don't shout pain communist reform right you know it well the problem with that story is it's once again a mythology you see because this is how it happened the crazy Maoist Cultural Revolution destroyed the economic planning mechanisms remember those economic planners remember anybody who wore glasses they had deported to the countryside if not beaten up right that was the Cultural Revolution it was a violent semi lunatic episode we could go into all the reasons now launched that we would go into the ramifications of how it unfolded in various different locales the variation but it was a self-destruction of planned economy capacity and then what happened the peasants did not want to starve again there had been gigantic horrendous famines already and so the peasants began to recreate market relations among themselves without the authority to do so they D collectivized and they entered into market or barter relations that were outside the planning mechanism and several hundred million people in the coastal areas remember it's a monsoon civilization so the wealth is in the South not the north the capital is in the north only because of the Mongol episode nobody would build a capital in that Dust Bowl today right the wealth is down in the south the monsoon civilization the southern part the coastal areas those peasants recreated the market yes they did in order not to starve and the Communists didn't want this to happen there was a fight at the top 78 79 80 81 82 you can trade on Tuesdays but no other days you can trade onions but you can trade rice each grudging decree after decree because there were communists the in like markets the thing that dong shall ping did which was very important would not reform in that sense as I say the society did that the peasants did that the intrapreneurial ism yes from below did that is very well documented you read yang from 96 you read Keijo from 96 they have case studies of the localities where this happened it can't penetrate the textbooks because of course mythologies are much stronger than facts but we're done did make a colossal impact was in the geopolitics because what did he do he switched partners he went to the United States he was four foot something tall and he put on a cowboy hat that was almost as tall as he was at a rodeo and he decided that China would de facto partner with yes guess what the United States with the West why would he do that let's think about the sphere of influence argument once more so here on China and I'm next to this place which is called Japan and this place called Japan is destroyed in the war and it rises from the ashes to become the second largest economy in the world and I'm watching that because it's this far away it's kind of like West Germany and East Germany and then I'm watching Japan lift South Korea up in similar fashion with investment technology transfer manufacturing and I'm watching this and I'm saying you know what this Western sphere of influence in the East is really powerful Japan South Korea Taiwan Hong Kong Singapore yeah I'm watching this happen it's on my doorstep and what are they doing they are selling to the United States domestic market that's what they're doing the reason why East Europe didn't work was because East Asia did you see the polls couldn't pay their debt the Romanians couldn't pay because they couldn't earn any foreign currency they had nothing to sell to Western markets but the East Asians could manufacture things that the biggest consumer engine in world history the United States domestic market wanted and paid for and that was the answer that was how you got wealthy you got into the US market and you are able to compete and sell things that Americans with wonder why it was not a given you can give anybody market access they won't succeed they'd be crushed by the competition what mainland China was up to the task it was able to do it like Japan and so you say to yourself that's fear of influence change don't shout pain the Soviet model forget it the US is our de facto partner and the US was willing to do this because of what because of geopolitics because of the Soviet US competition because in the Triangle we could pull China to quote our side I'm telling you geopolitics is the driver and the foundation and don't shout ping made a colossal contribution because of this geopolitical shift the Communists take credit for the economic reforms but they were belated and they were grudging and incomplete what dong did was to make it official policy in 92 when he took the southern tour after John a month when it looked like markets and liberalization was over that was critical but we're talking about well before then when the peasants did it on their own so here we have a story of geopolitics that works for the Soviets for Eastern Europe and for China to I'll tell the story move it up in time and what happens with China post-soviet Russia and the u.s. in the next lecture but let me now conclude part four the fourth and final part of the lecture all right we're right on time so here we are we have our roundtables to celebrate the roundtables we have a wonderful story we have heroes but it doesn't look right because this is not where we expect it to be remember all the stuff about countries that were partially free remember not nonsense remember this stuff about quote electoral democracy remember that garbage there people have tenure to this day luxurious University positions on that stuff now it's electoral authoritarianism all of a sudden it's the same mechanism techniques but somehow democracy got scratched and authoritarianism got inserted what we so diluted what did we miss we missed the losers we are witnessing a losers victory now democratic deficit there was one Democratic mechanisms we have the political intrapreneurial ISM yeah Democratic deficit Democratic mechanisms political intrapreneurial ISM for bond Democratic deficit Democratic mechanisms political intrapreneurial ISM kajinski Putin Trump then you could go on voilá the political intrapreneurial ISM however is not taken for granted that's the key ingredient you see you have to compete the way the Chinese did on the American market the way we did in the Cold War you got to be up to the competition you got to know your strengths on the other side's weaknesses and as pope john paul ii said on his first trip back to poland be not afraid that's the absolute key you don't need stormtroopers in violence you control the media but that's nothing you've got stories you've got the most powerful thing in the world you've got stories you've got grievances you've got enemies you've got stories stories that speak to the heart we call these mendacious stories we say their lives brexit all the promises but stories are very pause what is authoritarianism it's only four things it's coercive mechanisms you give me some coercive mechanisms I can do a lot for sure you need a revenue stream you don't have to grow the economy you just need cash the idea that there's some kind of bargain that authoritarians promised that if they raise the standard of living the people will be okay with not having freedoms that's garbage that's nonsense and what if the standard of living doesn't go up the authoritarians are going to say you know we violated the bargain we're going to leave power now there's no bargain social contract so people haven't given up their freedom willingly in some cases and the authoritarians are not going to admit that they didn't hold up their side of the bargain if the standard of living doesn't go up they're just going to use the coercive mechanisms but not only you see because if you have the revenue stream whatever it might be oil gas diamonds accounts in the federal reserve that don't belong to you that you somehow penetrate like Bangladesh's account and wire it to yourself through Malaysia like the South Korea and the North Koreans did right you just need revenue you need a revenue stream it's not that complicated you need control of a life chances you need control you need to be able to reward and punish people so if your state employment is high people are dependent on you right the middle-class in Russia the part that's still left there state employees and if they don't like the policy and they decide to voice that their life chances change because the regime has control of a life chances yeah so any course of mechanisms a revenue stream control of a life chances not total control but enough to reward and punish it's not that complex but the fourth thing you need and the first three are brittle without the fourth is you need stories you need a well neither well and you need to down in that well put the bucket and come up grievances enemies nationalism you got to have stories in the well and those wells have to be deep because you have to keep going back to them and back to them and back to them and you're not afraid of criticism because you have an alternative story you're not just suppressing you're promoting your story and these stories have resonance there was national glory and it escaped us so it was stolen from us they took our territory away they gave us gypsies or foreigners or immigrants or Fifth Column when you you know that the drill very well we can recapture this national glory we have to fight our enemies and so you have to give me more power more and more power so that I can fight on your behalf this is elementary this is a liberalism this is what fascism looks like today you don't need as I said the stormtroopers and the violence sure some of that you may employ but if you got coercive mechanisms a revenue stream control over life chances and a well of stories you're strong unless there's a geopolitical counterweight yeah unless the outside world isn't that friendly unless there's pressure from the outside because the outside world lives better or the outside world denies you access to the things you need let's call out the international banking system right yeah no authoritarianism without the geopolitical factor either geopolitics either inhibits or facilitates authoritarian regimes yeah there's either complacency decay refusal to spend money on a real military offshoring gone amuck does either all of that or there's instead resolved Alliance building institution building punishment of those who transgress yeah you know which one we've got now you know why authoritarianism not globally flourishing certainly not globally flourishing but eating away eating away at the liberal rules-based international order that's easy to criticize and definitely should be criticized but its absence is a whole new game potentially so communism is over it's not coming back ill liberalism is alive and the enormity of the tragedy is left the enormity of the tragedy they left across the 20th in the 21st century is still not even appreciated at an elementary level thank you for your time Steve thank you very much so much to talk about and we have just about half an hour to discuss those issues so with the privilege of the moderation let me ask you the first question to get us going could I ask you to comment given your conclusion what role does the current administration president in the US have on these liberal tendencies in the serial event once the westerlies thank you for that question we talked a little bit about that the first lecture I talked about how you know the CIA tried to destroy the Soviet Union from without and failed it had a fantasy of destruction of communism and then the General Secretary of the Communist Party the Soviet Union began to destroy the system from within and the CIA watched that process and couldn't believe that was going on I mentioned that Trump is not Gorbachev the United States is not on the verge of collapse nor is the West so the analogy is imperfect but we're in a kind of strange and crazy situation where the enemies couldn't do to the United States in the West what now the leader is doing my view is it's a very precarious situation I don't I don't predict the future I don't think it necessarily has to end badly the West has had periods of missile incompetence is the single most important dimension of politics in Washington not ideology but incompetence we have overcome episodes that were very significantly bad that was self created and so it could be that this is a passing phase it could be even that the current administration shifts in a different direction you know if you read John Kennedy's inaugural January 20th 1961 it's very short he talked about we will bear any burden we will need any challenge every fallen friend should know that we will defend freedom in every corner of the world yeah that was all correct now the execution of that was often poor and if he had not war is a prime but not the only example the Iraq war more recently we all know the critique but the resolve we forget the problem is to translate this into effective mechanisms and effective policies you can know what your values are and you can fail to defend them properly we're now in a situation where we've even forgotten what the values are blood alone failed to defend them properly so as I said it's a precarious situation but I don't make any predictions it could shift and we've overcome things like this before I will say however that when people break the rules when they transgress when freedom is threatened you got to be there there have to be punishments our bond cannot get away with what he does Kachinsky cannot get away with some of the stuff he does EU was better on Poland than it was on Hungary in part because Hungary came first then they saw what a big black guy it was to do nothing now you can say mechanisms are poor levers are weak don't have that much leverage over the situation that's not an excuse who are we what are our values why are we here how did we get here what do we stand for the same thing has to be said for the people in Washington those who call themselves the establishment what are they made of is it Volvo Grodd or is it something better than that and we're waiting to see absolutely waiting to see and just as a one second follow-up question would you say that just as the world and the West were caught by surprise by day 9 that the there was an element of surprise by the illiberal turn there was delusion my the first part of my talk was all about delusion the idea that intellectuals for example make history this is the single biggest delusion in the Academy because the intellectuals write all the books about history don't we yes we do and we put ourselves at the center of the story and when something is heroic we give ourselves agency and when something is less than heroic we begin to talk about structural factors or betrayal that's a great trope for intellectuals betrayal how something was really good and then it got sidetracked or betrayed or usurped or whatever it might be right yeah so yes of course we missed it because we were looking at ourselves and talking about ourselves and we weren't talking about society we weren't talking about the losers we weren't talking about history we weren't talking about all the things that we're now talking about which of course were not inevitable but are part of a prior story that we can all now point to in retrospect the way everyone predicts the day after on cable TV right and so yeah we did but you know not everyone not everyone there are people and we know who they are we can look back at them who said things in real time you know Ramona Rome in the 50s when Sartre was at his peak he said I'm an intellectual and on the right yeah he understood communism before others did he understood freedom and this was very important it wasn't 1989 or 1990 - or 1995 it was 98 was Czeslaw Milosz 49 he wrote that book captive mine right so there were people who know then early and now we separate them out as heroes because they were more prescient because they understood what the values and principles what was at stake right they were never Stalinists who then went the other way but let's give credit to those people to like Kolakowski unlike meekness for example Kolakowski was a true believing Stalinist for a time but he'd figured things out and look what he did as a result well we can do the same thing now with our history we can go back to 89 we go back to the 70s we can look at posnansky on Poland we can look at Roman l'abbé on Poland there's a lot of stuff that was there in real time and in the 90s - and we can sift that history and we can find where we are now in people who saw that coming and it's not the majority but those are our beacons and it's less than right who saw it's not one side or the other that's all I'm a non-partisan person I don't belong to a political party I'll add util ng list to your list of many many yeah so let's open it now in our group questions by 3 so that we can fit most in so let's take the front row here and so I have a question about the nature of the changes of the American economy yeah because it seemed to me that an important part of your story was a growing economy that actually produced Goods and raised the standard of living for a very large number of people yes and you know reading reading the news it just seems to me that the that the shift to a service economy and I don't know whether it is accurate to say that the larger proportion of the economy now plays played by finance but I wonder whether when you when you say we've forgotten our values that part of this is because the economy itself is changing and more and more people are less optimistic in a way that they were during the years that that you would discuss yeah thank you I was fully convinced by your description of the collapse of communism also as a witness of many many events at a time well I am not so completely convinced or by your arguments about why is the liberal and authoritarian tendencies are coming up now for instance in Europe what is the main trigger or what are the main triggers for that and I'm just in with respect to that question just another small question you know the theory I think Road Eric about not the impossibility of globalization of national state and democracy and I asked this question especially with respect to European Union because we are living here and we are all at least not all but some people are very worried about what is happening here I think it's a little bit the same way in there's a lot of commentary globally in the West that inequality is basically one of the of the big enemies within the West there maybe you could comment on that and maybe the same issue just from a different perspective because you mentioned the missus and the history is that the that the authoritarian regimes you may even call it religions that they sort of create or propagate what is the myths or the religion for the West yes in the future that's the question that's the exact question thank you that is it so let's talk a little bit about the American economy so if you eliminate markets and private property you can't have freedom we know that because there's history every case where that's been done freedom was lost and economic dynamism was also lost and that's why communism is that because the elites understand this problem even if the Academy doesn't fully understand it yet okay so when you have a dynamic market economy it does a lot of stuff and some of the things it does you know caused massive disruption that's what dynamism is about there's this you know fanciful wonderful term creative destruction that comes from Jean painter right okay it's not actually creative disruption there's a chaotic quality to it that's much more than creative destruction because there's there's chaos even in the success this is Hyman Minsky talks about how economic success leads you to miss price risk that when markets go up people miss price risk and they take greater risks and so there's an inherent instability in market success right that's Minsky's work we understand this that's just the way things are why should we react as if that's a shock to us but let's talk about your inequality issue or your issue of you know when America produced things yeah so let's think about this let's go back to 1946 what was the percentage of the global GDP of the US economy in 46 yes 50 percent fifty percent yeah so this is it's easy to do let's destroy let's have or two let's kill 55 million people let's destroy everybody's infrastructure their housing let's just kill it all and with the US no fighting on its territory instead the war is an economic boom and now the rest of the world is flattened and so what's the u.s. going to have from 46 right through the first oil shock it's going to have a pathway that you can't recreate there's no going back to 46 and 47 or 48 and the 50s and the 60s and when my father worked in a factory in brought a house right you're not going to work in a factory and buy a house outside of certain specific circumstances right those circumstances can't be recreated you can't go back to that because you have to destroy the free world to get that lift behind the u.s. so you're left with you're left with the consequences of success the consequences of success right because success breeds more trouble than failure does failure is easy success however creates all sorts of interest groups it polarizes and locks down a political system as the interest groups gain control over it right the winners for example gain control okay Trump representing the losers seems to make a breakthrough but obviously it's not a breakthrough for those who are on or losing it right so this is just the cost of success so what you need are corrective mechanisms you need lower cost of entry into markets you need to break market power of people who can prohibit the entry of others you need greater investment in education and skills and training and community colleges not harvesting Stanford's right you need all of those things that reintroduce dynamism into an ossified system and that open up opportunity but what's our conversation about it's about redistribution because we have a sense fairness we have an important sense of fairness and that important sense of fairness leads us to say you know we have to redistribute it because some have too many obvious benefits to an increasing number of people yes yes again it's not clear to me that is the case now they're not making enough yes yes I'm simply wondering why is it with people in America are not feeling optimistic in the way that he was before I okay we have to go back yeah I agree with you completely but but I'm saying that that's a consequence of success you know I quoted the the greatest living the preeminent philosopher today in the first lecture louis c.k and what he said was you know everything is amazing and nobody is happy right and that's it that's what you're saying and I agree with that I'm always saying that that's a consequence of success that that doesn't surprise me and moreover that that's not something that was easily preventable and so what you're dealing with then is you need policies and levers right that break ossified structural power and reintroduce the openness that you had before which form these wealthy powerful interest groups now you can say that it's easier said than done and I agree but that's what public policy is public policy is about what you can do as well as what you need to do and it's not about what would be you know good in a book published by central university press or whatever right that's a different type of policy policy is what you can do when you know billionaires can buy politicians and those kinds of things right that's where you have to have policy that's we have to be clever and so my view is you know we have a tremendous amount of manufacturing in the United States right now we have an incredibly dynamic manufacturing economy it just doesn't employ people the same way the rate of employment in manufacturing is lower than it was before largely because of automation once again largely because of success this is the problem the EU expanded to 28 and now it seems like it's a shambles right it's success that gives you the problems it's not a shambles its success but within the success you have to reinsert the elements of dynamism because it's all about dynamism and these corrective mechanisms and the only way to do that right is through coalition politics is through the sausage-making it's through resistance in the streets it's through electing people its replying pressure and it's through political intrapreneurial ISM so here's the answer to that other question you know how come things are in Europe the way they are now and like I said the key ingredient is political intrapreneurial ISM that's the key agreement because if you have ineffective politicians things don't happen if you have effective politicians they can catalyze people say there's a brushfire it was waiting to happen somebody needed to light the fuse well yeah somebody needed to light the fuse that's the whole story of political entrepreneurial ISM if you're ineffective as a politician you don't last someone else more effective comes and beats you we're going to see this now in France right in days what are we four days away from the election in France we're going to see who had the intrapreneurial ISM right it's very hard to read because we read it through a prism that doesn't give us as direct access as we need we instead have this tremendous filter problem but the political entrepreneurial ISM is the key variable and so Europe needs political entrepreneurialism on the anti populist side that's what it needs if people came along who were effective they had the story to tell about national greatness and about how that's connected to openness and immigration and economic dynamism and investment in education and whatever else they might that story and they were good at telling that story and they were good at rebutting their competitors right we would have that story we would be in that position the problem is globalization international identity transnational identity is always minora terian by definition and nationalism is always majoritarian by definition always and so people are ignorant who try to tell transnational stories not rooted in a national one what they're telling you is I want to be in the minority I don't want to fight for them for the majority nationalism is pliable the content of nationalism is not given national stories can be flipped you can only be an internationalist if you can tell that in an effective national story there is no other way and if you can't tell your internationalism in an effective national story I can predict what's going to happen to you you're going to end up in the minority someone else is going to come along and in political entrepreneur and they're going to seize the national card and they're going to play it because they're skillful and they're going to crush you are you going to say they're lying they're mendacious then they're telling people what people want to hear but they're never going to give it to them and I said what are you telling people you're not your story isn't mendacious also in answer to your question about all the glory that's going to come to the majority supposedly from the openness so the air liberal tendencies the problem is you need a counter national story and that counter national story has to be effective it has to win people over in a competitive marketplace known as democracy right democracy is a corrective mechanism in a big way the only trouble with democracy is when you can use it to eliminate it right that's what gurbles was about right remember him he he kept saying this democracy is amazing it's our greatest tool we use it we get into power and then we end it right that's when democracy runs into trouble right and that's where we're on the cusp here with the orb on stuff with air Dewan right that's where we're on the cusp but those people can't Bank in North Korea Turkey and Hungary cannot do their banking in North Korea they can't have an economy without the Western banking system the levers of power that we have over them are life-and-death existential if we understood that and we use that right so but we need a competitive story to beat them in addition to using the mechanisms understanding the power that we have you know about the inequality the the era of equality the post-world War two ERA is not a the principle historical story if you look at history inequality is much more typical however if you have a Great Depression which was incredibly destructive of wealth and you have a war which was incredibly destructive of wealth you can equalize things how you get to a more equal point without a Great Depression and without war nobody's answered that question yet I don't want the Great Depression and I don't want the war to get to the position where working-class people can buy housing again right just because anything worked conscientiously my father had no college education I was the first in the family to go to college he had the manufacturing job that worked in that epoch I have the intellectual labor job that works in this epoch right but I benefited from the economic and human capital that he was able to acquire in that epoch that now people like him can't do the same and their kids can't enjoy the kind of benefits right so you it's not something that anybody is evil that anybody did wrong it's not a conspiracy right it's not something that is necessarily bad even it's it's the way the world works however you get inside that system and you tweak and you push the story of social mobility is very mixed there is a media version of the story which corresponds 99% to the leftist understanding of the world and then there's a sociological story in the sociology literature which is highly variegated and full of interesting stuff including natural experiments about how things got better for whole communities right but we can't get to the sociological story because where we have a political story that is really hard for us to what to give up because it's neither our hearts right so it's going to be hard to get anywhere near that going to be very hard finally let me say one more thing you know it's very easy to be a pessimist pessimism comes naturally to me and the reason pessimism beats optimism is because a you're always right if you predict things are going to be bad somehow they are and you look good but if you make a mistake you predict bad stuff and good stuff happens you're even better off because when you're wrong is because the world is a better place as a result right so pessimism is wonderful and it's very easy as I say for me sort of it's kind of in in my DNA to be pessimistic but the story I'm telling today is an optimistic story it's a story about the right values about tremendous accomplishments about colossal success what's China today compared to ma can you describe it as anything other than a colossal success what's India today compared to 1947 you know all the problems of China you know all the problems of India but is the situation now not incredible successful what about the European Union my god the European Union is astonishing it's amazing the European yin I could tell you all the problems just like you could and you know the currency and union without we can all talk about that till we're blue in the face but do we remember a different history in Europe yeah and is this history significantly better yeah so the problems are real and we need a better analysis of them in addition to mechanisms on them but we have to learn that success is the challenge we have to rise to the success we can't retreat and and faint and lose our nerve just because we have success thank you a professor kotkin I will now end this session given that we're on time with apologies to those who wanted to ask questions but let me just add everything that you already know that we're in the middle of a fascinating journey down a road that Professor Kotkin is taking us and we are impatient to reach to the final point in the third lecture next Wednesday so please keep your questions those of you who wanted to ask again with my apologies but at the end please join me in thanking professor kotkin for this second lecture [Applause] [Music]

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Published: Wed Apr 26 2017

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Part 3:

Stephen Kotkin: Sphere of Influence III - The Chip on the Shoulder

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What, if anything, is the Difference between Fascism and Communism?'

Do we really know the answer? Two opposing political projects have framed that question. One equates fascism and communism as totalitarianism; the other proffers a heroic portrayal of communism as anti-fascism. The first delegitimates the left, the second legitimates it. But there is a different story, one rooted in a history that has always been there, if less visible. That history has to do with the stabilities and instabilities of illiberalism, of the interplay between authoritarianism, private property, and aggrieved nationalism, which is always more populous and passionate than any transnational ideology. Is there really something new going on now today?